


My Beautiful Boy

by AlexMeg



Series: Alucinatio [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Draco Malfoy Needs a Hug, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Hogwarts Eighth Year, I mean THE SLOWEST, M/M, Minor Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Obsessive Harry, Parallel Universes, Past Torture, Pining Draco Malfoy, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Requited Unrequited Love, Slow Burn, Smitten Draco Malfoy, Suicidal Thoughts, and when i say slow burn, in a dream
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:21:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 62,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexMeg/pseuds/AlexMeg
Summary: Potter doesn't leave. He slides off the mattress, and instead settles down beside his bed on the floor. He adjusts on his legs, his chin cushioned on his arm, and then begins to talk. His voice is quiet and rough with lingering slumber, the sound of soft kisses, of wild dancing and unbridled laughter filling his head.When Draco wakes up, once again, somewhere in the dark of the night and under the dim starlights of the constellations spell that he doesn't remember casting for a second time, there is nobody at the floor of his bedside.He wonders if he'd only dreamed it all.Sequel to 'Alucinatio'.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Series: Alucinatio [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713685
Comments: 575
Kudos: 1563





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!  
> To any new readers, this is part two of a series. Part one is named Alucinatio, as is the series. If you're interested in this story, it's fairly important to read the first part in order to understand the concept, some details and the character development as well as the dynamic between Draco and Harry in this story.  
> For the readers that have read the first part and will continue to read the second, I'll try to give a list of references for part one where necessary. The plot of Part One has also been written down at the end notes of the first chapter.

When the sight of Draco at the fireplace finally seems to sink in, his mother begins to cry, reaching forward for him with her hands. Her hair is well-kempt, her clothes sharp and pressed as usual, but she is thin and frail under it all.

Draco places his suitcase at his feet and steps forward into her hands, his throat burning. He lets his mother's palms cup his cheeks, her thumbs brushing over the apples of them and under his eyes, lets her kiss his face all over, lets her weep against the side of it soundlessly after. He holds her, buries his nose into the shoulder of his mother's dress and almost feels small again, almost like he's seven years old and not older than seven decades, when nothing had ever happened to them.

It goes on for a long time, her crying against him, whispering— _my baby boy, my son, my beautiful son_ and _you're home, you're home you're home you're home—_ and his clinging back to her, his face set against a tremor. She quiets, after a few moments, but she doesn't let go of him for a long time after.

When she does, she does so with a final kiss to his forehead, brushing a warm and nimble hand over his head and shifting down to his cheek.

"Come, darling." Narcissa smiles, a flicker of one, her eyelashes damp and clumped together, but her bittersweet joy crinkles into her eyes. Her hand falls as she turns away, coming up to wipe her thumb under her eyes and dabbing the tears on them away with fingers. "Let's talk over some lunch." 

She calls for Mimi and requests for lunch. Draco surveys the interior of the vast manor as he follows after his mother, familiar and strange all at the same time, full of his father's absence and drenched in something black, suffocating, as if perhaps they'd all left their sickening energy behind in every corner of the walls. He keeps one hand in the pocket of his trousers, hidden and detached. His other hand runs over the rough wood of the stairway railing, traces over the old paint of the walls, the tips of his fingers tentative and distracted over it all.

They sat on the chairs and slept in the beds. They ate at the table and used their cutlery. They walked the carpets and floors, left phantasmical echoes of their voices in the halls. They left behind the screams and cries of the tortured. Everywhere he looked, there were phantoms of corpses, of blood staining their table sheets, their rugs and tiles.

They took a room that was once his and slept in its bed, just because they could. Greyback was one of them.

He doesn't understand how his mother does it. Live here. Forced to live with the ghosts of their past. Forced to live in a place that no longer feels like her own. He knows he can't ever.

He can't ever stay here.

They eat in his parents'—his mother's room because neither of them can stomach anything at the dining table anymore. Sitting on the bed together, back against the headboards, he can sense his mother's gaze on him. When he looks up at her, she smiles at him, a soft twitch of the corners of her lips. It's only then he realizes that he's forgotten to raise his own spoon to his mouth.   
  


In the quiet of the afternoon, Draco finds himself thinking of him. He tries not to, but he ends up doing so anyway. 

He wonders if he's ever going to not think of him. If he's going to spend all his life trying not to now.

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


"Where'd you go, Teddy?"

Harry shakes the curtains out of the way, making a clear rustling noise. He glances behind him at Teddy, a broad grin playing on his lips. Teddy is enveloped in Ginny's arms, his hair as ginger-red as hers, pudgy hands pushed up into his eyes. Ginny's grinning as well, her chin to the side of his hair, as she watches Teddy erupt into belly-laughter.

"Teddy!" Ron rounds the couch with noisy footsteps, pretending to search for him as he throws Teddy glances every few seconds with a smile. "Where'd you go, Teddy? I can't find you!"

Teddy breaks into uncontrollable giggles.

"If we don't find you, Molly's going to hex us! If not her, then your grandmum! What are we going to do, Teddy?"

"Oh no!" Ron exclaims, overdramatically. "I think he's really disappeared! Now we're really gone, Harry!"

"Teddy!" Harry calls out. "Ginny, have you seen Teddy?"

"No I haven't!" Ginny says, with a bubble of laughter in her voice. "Don't tell me you've lost him again now, Harry!"

Teddy removes his hands away from his face, blinking big eyes as they readjust to the suddenly reappearing world.

"Oh there you are! I found you." Harry says, in feigned relief, rushing over to him along with Ron, taking him up by the underarms from Ginny and kissing his head. Teddy squeals, belly-laughing so hard he's folding over, his tiny fists clenching and his face scrunching up. Ron lets out an exaggerated puff next to him, touching Teddy's back. "I found you."  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


Three weeks later, Draco returns to the Manor again, with gashes on his left forearm.

His mother is frantic, hands all over his face and over his arms, her panicked breaths gasping and short as she screams for a house elf. Being on House Arrest and unable to cast a Patronus nowadays, there isn't much she can do to get him to St. Mungos when he stops the house-elves from Apparating him there.

The world drifts away just as her trembling hand hovers her wand over him.

He wakes up to his mother beside him, the chair left empty in favour of kneeling on the floor to be nearer to him. Her hand is clutching the back of his to her own cheek, cushioned over her other arm.

She blinks awake to the stirring of his numbed hand. When she sees his opened eyes, she straightens, the side of her hair tousled. "Draco?" She quickly climbs up onto the bed beside him, leaning her head over him and running her fingers through his hair. The relief on her face is painfully tangible. "Thank Circe you're awake."

Draco's brows are furrowed, his eyes groggy and gritty. "How long..."

"Three days. Mimi healed you." She had a deep frown, lining between her brows. She looks older than she is from her stressed features. "What happened to you?"

Draco tries to push himself up into a sitting position. His mother shakes her head, pressing down on his shoulders. "You've lost a lot of blood. You must rest." She swallows, her face quivering. She blinks, pressing her lips together in restraint. Draco complies, laying back down with a frustrated breath. "Tell me what happened. Who did this to you?"

"I don't know. I didn't…" He'd been in Knockturn Alley, sometime at night, making his way back to a small room he'd rented in a nameless residence. He hadn't seen. It had been dark, and all he'd heard was a voice, a _Diffindo,_ and his erratic and unsteady magic, drawn from the quiver of fear in his chest, had only just helped him escape. He tells her all of this.

Narcissa asks him to stay for a few more days, verging on a plea, _just until you recover, darling, please._ He looks at his thin and frail mother, alone for months on end, alone even after he's returned, who watched him every moment he was with her as if he's about to disappear, and says, "I will, Mother." He takes a hold of her hand with his good arm, making the reality of himself, his presence, known the only way he knows how. "I will."

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


His mother sits with him for most of the day. Finding himself unable to lie still and silent to rest, he lugs himself into the library where he tries to distract himself with books, to no avail, and then in the living room where he opens a bottle of scotch in front of the fireplace and plans to drink himself into stupor, simply out of pure boredom (and something else entirely), but his mother takes it away from him before he'd been able to.

Most of the day is spent staying out in the gardens, where Draco feels more at ease than he does between the walls. He and his mother spend the evening recalling old memories.

Draco remembers being seven years old and learning to fly with his father here. When he reminisces with his mother over this, she smiles, but there is a twitch of something in her eyes. After a long, silent moment, she says, "It wasn't your father who'd taught you to fly, darling. We'd hired a private flight instructor for you, do you remember?"

When the silence begins to press down on his lungs, he asks her to speak to him, and she does. She keeps up a chatter of everything and nothing, about her wild rose bushes in the garden, sometimes asking him of Potter and his time in the hospital, but sometimes there isn't anything left to say inside a big house with little to do.

When there isn't anything else, he turns on his wireless to fill the silence more often than not, playing tunes he doesn't always pay attention to. 

At night, Draco finds that sleep is impossible without a certain voice murmuring him towards it. Without the vivid awareness of a presence beside him, and the calm and safety that had settled inside of his chest like the quiet after a storm.

The glow of the light colors the room a faint yellow, the floorboard of his mother's room hard under his back. He can hear her breathing, the light sound of the currents of air moving in and out. Draco thinks she's sleeping, but it turns out soon that she isn't.

The bedsheets rustle, followed by the sound of bare feet padding over to his makeshift bed a moment after, growing clearer as she nears. He feels a shift beside him, feels the weight dipping on his makeshift bed, her gentle hand in his hair.

"Can't sleep either?" Draco shakes his head. Narcissa pats her lap. "Come here."

Draco obliges her soft beckoning, rolling over to his elbow and placing his head on her lap. She bends down, folds an arm across the front of his shoulders and pulls back the side of his hair, kissing his head.

Draco looks up at her. "Why can't you sleep?" 

"I worry about you," Narcissa says, stroking his hair. Draco has found a newfound weakness for causing her trouble these days. 

"You don't have to worry about me, Mother."

"Well, regardless, I do." She pauses in hesitation, then, and then inhales a controlled breath. "Draco, the Headmistress of Hogwarts' response came today. She says you're welcome to return, bearing a few conditions."

"I'm not looking to return to Hogwarts. Whatever her conditions, it is of no concern to me."

"But I think it's just what you need, Draco," his mother says thoughtfully. "To be around people. To be somewhere familiar. I know you may be concerned about people being unkind to you, but Professor McGonagall has assured me that she will find a way to see to that. You will be safe there, and taken care of. Will you at least consider?"

Draco, in no mood to argue or persuade, doesn't answer her. 

In the silence that follows, Draco thinks of his father and Severus, the absence of them that he can no longer keep at a distance from a hospital bed, hollow and dissociated and pretending they were still out there, alive and well. His father's vacant study room, and the living room where he'd sit in front of the fireplace and drink his scotch, and the too large bed where his mother sleeps alone. He thinks of Severus' absence leaving the front of the Potions' class empty, the desk in the Head of Slytherin's office, his house where Draco had often Flooed over to for tutoring as a boy.

"I miss them."

Narcissa continues the motion of her fingers, running through his hair.

"Severus." Draco clears his throat, something else with it. "And Father."

"As do I."

"He died ashamed of me."

She stills at that, her hands stopping as well.

"Draco…" Narcissa shakes her head in disbelief. "That is nonsense."

Draco doesn't say anything. He wishes he hadn't said anything at all.

"Do you know why your father was desperate enough to risk his life in order to escape the Aurors, Draco?" Narcissa asks softly.

The answer is obvious enough. "He didn't want to go to Azkaban."

His mother's face pinches with sorrow, unfathomably. She takes his hand and kisses it. "But more than anything, he wanted to save you. It was all he talked about in the days before he died. Nothing else seemed to matter to him anymore but finding a way to get you out." She circles her thumb over the back of his hand. "I can admit, I had often loathed him for his flaws and skewed priorities, but I can also promise you he died loving you more than anything in the end."

It doesn't sink into his mind for a long time, like oil to water.

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


_"Draco was afraid when they took him," Lucius says, staring into the fireplace. He turns his glass of scotch in hand. "My boy. He called for me, and I looked upon him with discomfiture and reproach."_

_Narcissa stares into the fire, sitting beside him, silent and unmoving. Sometimes the cold anger won over her sorrow, and the only person to direct it at was her husband. Sometimes she thinks it's better than the sorrow that leaves her downtrodden and weeping, her mind frantic and racing with horrid images of her son, crying and screaming, lonely and in pain._

_Incredible, how Lucius' priorities work. How too many things come above their son for him._

_Lucius shakes his head, slightly. His brows are deeply lined together, over eyes widened in lamenting. His head tilts towards her, only so, not looking at her. "Narcissa, I cannot understand why." His voice wavers, imperceptibly._

_"Cannot understand what, Lucius?" she questions, void of emotion and interest._

_For a long moment, he says nothing. His silver gaze is set alight by the orange-yellow glow of fire reflecting into them, blank and impassive and brimming with thoughts._

_"Why anything had ever mattered more than him."_

_Lucius drinks the entire glass of scotch in one gulp, puts it down on the table and stands up. She listens to the taps of his dress shoes against the hardwood floor, the taps of his cane, growing further and fainter as he walks away._

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


The Burrow is warm in August, hushed in the night when the house is asleep. There is only a low hubbub of conversation that's verging on an end when Harry returns to his shared room with Ron. Ginny's passing by him out the door, her voice fading on a _good night._

Ginny smiles at Harry. "Teddy was just asking for you." She nods at Teddy in Ron's arms. He has his little, baby-pudged fingers in his mouth, his chin covered in drool. Upon catching sight of Harry, his face goes beaming with a gummy grin, his eyes turned green like his own. "You're the favourite today, so you might have to keep him with you tonight."

Teddy is a fickle one, having days where he prefers certain people more than others. Andromeda will never be able to say it, but Harry knows she doesn't mind too much when others take over caring for Teddy. No one else does either. He sees grief in her eyes, still, when she looks at Teddy. He thinks it hurts her to see him sometimes, to see his eyes and his lips and not have her daughter. 

Harry half-laughs. "I'm looking forward to him telling me bedtime stories."

Ginny quirks a small smile. She kisses his cheek. "Yeah. Might help you sleep a bit better. Goodnight, Harry."

Soon after sharing a goodnight with Ron, the room is filled with his steady and loud breathing, which Harry has gotten rather used to after sharing a room at the Burrows and a dorm at Hogwarts with him for years. It's almost comforting now, the familiarity of it, the way it grounds him into the present.

Settled in bed, Harry's arms curl around Teddy, cradling the baby close and protective into the side of his ribs. Teddy lifts his stuffed hippogriff above his head, showing it to Harry, telling him a whole story that only he understands.

Harry watches Teddy, cooing and babbling until he's droopy-eyed. He nods, laughs and responds every now and then, kisses his curls. He thinks of Remus and Tonks.

Grief had been something so big that Harry didn't know how to feel it for months after it happened, and now it comes out in ebbs; at the sight of their old pictures, at the sight of Teddy doing something wonderful or funny or endearing, or him reaching a milestone, and the sight of the empty spaces in George's room and the unoccupied chair at the kitchen table, the whereabout clock where Harry came back one day and found his own face had taken its place. Not to replace, of course. Never to replace. But only to put it there.

 _Fred kept asking, did you know?_ Molly had said. _'Are we ever going to put Harry's face in that, Mum? He's good as part of the family now, you know.' I've been wanting to do that for a very long time, but I never got around to it. Funny, how many things you never get around to until it's too late, hm?"_

There were empty spaces at the jokes shop, where George worked alone, and in the suffocating sorrow between him and Ron some nights when he wakes up crying and missing his brother. In Andromeda's eyes when she looked at Teddy and remembered what she'd lost. In Teddy's sweet, unaware smiles and his innocence, the spaces around him filled by everyone but those that brought him into this world. In letters Harry no longer receives, having _Padfoot_ signed at the bottom. In his owl cage, where he still hasn't gotten himself another owl. There are empty spaces in the hollows of Harry's heart.

He looks at the baby in his arms, his heart swelling into a bruise, a melancholic sort of fondness. He looks at him and he thinks of Remus and Tonks, everything they'll never get to see or know about Teddy. They'll never get to see or know how wonderful he is. 

"You're going to be so loved." Harry brushes his lips against the baby's forehead. He's fallen asleep against his chest. They were the same, Harry and Teddy, but they won't grow up the same. "I know you'll grow up one day, and you'll miss them very much, but you'll never be anything short of loved, Teddy."

In the quiet of the night, Harry wonders of Hermione, of how she is. He misses her deeply, just as Ron does, even though they've both been rather terrible at returning her owls. However, she needs the time with her parents after having them regain their memories of her so recently. There's only a few weeks left now until they meet again at the Hogwarts Express.

He wonders of Draco, of where he is. Harry had sent an owl to his mother sometime after St. Mungos, inquiring of her well-being and that of Draco's. True to Draco's word, and to Harry's expectations, Narcissa had replied he was no longer staying at the Manor. He'd stuck around for a day, said his farewells and then took off, sending her letters every few days with no disclosure of his current location. _I miss him,_ she'd written. _But I could see that being here had caused him fear and pain. Even after they've all gone, Harry, their sickening stench remains_ —

Is he alone and afraid? Is he safe and alright?

Strange how his insides twist for a boy that he once thought he'd loathed more than anything. Strange how the thought of him tugs at his gut, leaves him wishing he'd come back. Strange how often he thinks of him, of their time at St. Mungos, more than any of the hundreds of things that could be on his mind after a war. 

Perhaps Draco's something easier to think of than all of them, something puzzling and fascinating the way he'd always been, even if mostly infuriating once, and they'd been something there at the hospital, hadn't they been? Something greater than strangers, than old childhood rivals. Somewhat friends.

On a firecall with Hermione, Ron sitting beside him on the floor against the couch, Harry had passed on Draco's words of gratitude and farewell. Ron had been the more baffled one, which made sense when Hermione sprung on them that Draco had personally apologized to her for his past behaviour, not so much in words as in his tone and expression, but nonetheless, it had happened. Ron hadn't been closely exposed to Draco's changing demeanour, and so therefore he still struggled to wrap his head around this.

Inexplicably, Harry had found himself unable to relay the rest of the way the story had ended. The words had never come. 

Sometimes he's still not sure if he didn't only dream or imagine it. It's been weeks and he hasn't been able to fully acknowledge what had happened, what he'd learned, beyond a vague, distant thought that doesn't sink into his brain, a memory, quickly blinked away. Yet it came back over and over like the sea, his heart left pounding wild and erratic in his throat, his lips thrumming with a phantom kiss. It keeps him awake half of the nights and he can't quite explain why.

  
  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  
  


Draco is passing by his mother's room when he hears the sounds. The sobs muffled behind the closed door. 

"Mother?" Draco's hand is already twisting the doorknob and pushing it open, and then he's inside the room, and he's kneeling in front of her. Narcissa is hunched over, her face buried in her hands. Her shoulders are quivering, but the sobs have stopped abruptly as soon as he'd entered. "Tell me what's wrong." 

She doesn't move nor answer. Draco takes her hands, pulling it away from her swollen, red face, holding them in his own. She swallows hard. "Mother, please."

Narcissa shakes her head, turning her head away to hide her face. "It's nothing." She lets go of one of his hands and wipes her fingers over her cheeks. "Don't worry, darling."

"Tell me why you're upset."

Narcissa touches his cheek, stroking it gently, smiles at him in forced reassurance. "It's nothing for you to worry about. I'm only not feeling well, that's all."

Draco puts his hand on her forehead to check her temperature. Narcissa shakes her head, taking his hand and kissing the back of it, pressing it against her cheek.

"Come here," she says, drawing him up on the bed next to her by his hand. Draco follows her, settling in front of her.

"Those weeks you were gone, and I didn't know where you were," Narcissa begins softly. Her thumb rubs his palm in circles. "It felt like you never really came back."

"I'm back." It's all he can think of saying. "I'm here now."

"I know." Narcissa brushes her hand over the side of his hair, pulling it back. "But I hate seeing you here as well." 

A wrinkle on the sheets draws in all the focus of his gaze. 

"You're reminded of them here. I know it hurts and scares you."

Draco's jaw tightens. "I don't understand what you want me to do then, Mother." 

Narcissa pauses for a moment, silent, and then says, "I want you to be somewhere I know you'll be safe. Even if it's just for a year right now."

Draco withdraws from her hands, shaking his head. She drops them to the bed, her lips pressing together. "I'm not going there."

"Why not?"

_I can't see him again. I wasn't supposed to—_

"Explain to me, Mother, how you think I'll be safe in a place where I'll be abhorred."

"I've spoken to the Headmistress _—"_

"Who, I imagine, believes other students would be more likely to require protection from _me_. She doesn't give a _damn—_ "

"Draco _— "_

"I'm not safe anywhere, Mother. I won't be any safer there than I would be _—_ "

"Harry will be there."

Draco falls silent. His fingers clench into the sheets, his heart kicking up a storm. _That is precisely the issue,_ he thinks, but his mother seems to expect this to reassure him.

"Draco, Harry… he will be there. Didn't you say he will return to Hogwarts? I can ask him to _—_ "

"You will do no such thing," Draco interrupts her coldly.

"Draco, I've been _alone_ ," Narcissa whispers, her voice wavering. Her breaths are beginning to race in her emotion. "Do you _understand?_ I have been alone for months and I will be alone now for the next _—next two decades_ in this damned revolting Manor with little to do outside of gardening! I have too much time on my hands and so all I do is think and worry about _you!_ "

"Mother…"

"I spent months fearing I'll never see you come home, and then you did and Salazar Draco, it's as if sometimes I still can't believe you're here right in front of me, and then you were gone so fast it seemed as if you were never here at all and once again I was left in a perpetual state of terror and uncertainty, not knowing where you were, if you were safe and well, just like the months before all over again, and then you returned weeks later _—_ hurt and _—_ and _bleeding_ and _—_ "

Draco reaches out to touch her arm, tugging at her. Narcissa is beginning to fall apart once more, falling forward into his shoulder, clutching at him, and his heart twists at his thin and frail mother, at the frantic sounds of her weeping, the sounds of the grief she still carried around with her of the last year.

"I'm sorry. Salazar, I'm so sorry, I seem so selfish thinking only of myself when you've _—_ " Narcissa is mumbling, crying. Draco shushes her, burying his nose into her shoulder. She swallows hard, composing herself. She touches his upper back, drawing back from him. "Draco, I _only_ want to know you're somewhere safe _._ "

"Alright," Draco says, and tries to push away all thoughts of just what he's agreeing to, tries to push away all thoughts of him. He looks at his mother, his thin and frail and broken mother, and knows only that he can no longer burden her. His throat convulses, and he clears it, his eyes trained on her. "If you need me to go there so much, then I will, for you."

Narcissa frames his face, pulls it down to kiss his temple, rests her forehead against his. "I can't bear any more of this fear of losing you," she whispers. "I'm tired of it."

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot of Part One as goes:  
> Draco is taken captive on the orders of Voldemort as punishment for not fulfilling his task and is severely abused. Severus seeks rewards from Voldemort and uses them to be allowed to see Draco. Upon learning of the severity of his torment, he slips Draco a vial of a potion named Alucinatio on his next visit. This potion gives the drinker vividly realistic dreams of a bright and wonderful life consisting of all that they desired but leaves them comatose in reality, the cure of which is the tears of those the user craves the love of. Draco dreams of a life where there is no Voldemort nor Death-Eaters, where his family is happy and he has certainty of his father's love for him, and where he begins a friendship and eventually a relationship with Harry.
> 
> The third chapter of the story is set during the chapter Malfoy Manor, where Harry, Ron and Hermione are captured by Snatchers and brought in front of the Malfoys. Narcissa and Lucius use this as an opportunity to manipulate the Snatchers into bringing Draco to them so that he can identify Harry. Draco is awakened by Lucius' tears and is asked to identify Harry. He refuses to give an apparent answer, ensuring more time for all of them. Eventually Harry and his friends escape, having no choice but to leave Draco behind. Narcissa and Lucius are forced to hand Draco back over to His tormentors. Severus visits him once more and, on his plea, gives him the potion again.
> 
> In the Fourth Chapter, Draco is rescued by Harry, Ron and Hermione, but remains comatose due to the potion and is on the verge of death. 
> 
> In the Fifth Chapter, it is discovered that Lucius is dead. Harry speaks for Narcissa at her trial and searches for anyone who can awaken Draco, to no avail. The chapter ends with him pondering over Draco's fate and shedding tears of sorrow and remorse at his bedside.
> 
>   
> The next chapter begins with Draco awakened by Harry's tears, unbeknownst to Harry, and is calmed only by the sight of him. Harry later tells him of his father and godfather's death, and his mother being on House Arrest. He decides to stay with Draco at St. Mungos after witnessing his grief from outside the door. Having lived a bright and beautiful life that is completely opposite to his reality, one where Harry could never feel what he'd felt for him there, Draco tries to push him away by pulling all of his old antics to save himself any more grief. Harry eventually explodes out of anger and leaves, and then on calming, decides that it is best for him to not stay if Draco doesn't want him there.
> 
> On a conversation with Hermione, it is pointed out that Draco talks to no one but Harry, which may be indicative of something contradictive to his unkind behaviour. Harry comes back later to find Draco in the midst of a severe panic attack and, in his desperation to calm him down, pulls him down to the bed with himself and lets Draco weep in his chest. After this, Draco is more open to allowing Harry's company, having learned that Harry's departure will hurt either way.
> 
>   
> In the final chapter, Draco is given his verdict, a confiscation of much of his wealth and a probation period of six months. He apologizes to Hermione in the hospital for his past mistreatment of her, and after completely recovering from his physical injuries, he confesses his feelings to Harry and kisses him farewell.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References are at the end notes!
> 
> Warning for one scene of bullying, panic attack, flashbacks to past torture along with very vague references to past sexual abuse. Please beware!

At the nine and three quarters platform of King's Cross Station, standing among the bustling crowds of people with his suitcase in hand, Draco sees him.

He sees his tousled raven-black hair amongst ginger-reds and bushy brown, all the rest of the world around him blurred out. He sees him leaning his face close to the crying infant in his arms, murmuring to him, a soothing hand running over baby-blue locks. The golden sunlights of the morning are falling down on him, alighting his cheeks, catching on the ebony of his curls and the green of his eyes.

The trains are halted still on the rail tracks, the smell of smoke filtering through the air. People pass by on their way to them, cutting through his vision. Potter looks up at Weasley as he says something, his smile breaking into a grin crinkling at his gaze, glancing over at Granger to share his amusement.

Potter's eyes shift around, then, and in the split-second glimpse of his face, just as another passerby cuts by the line of vision, Draco catches his roving gaze land on him, twitching to a stop as a furrow sets in between his dark brows.

Draco steps back, turning around, and fades into the crowds.

  
  


**...**

  
  


Luna Lovegood comes into Draco's compartment and asks if she can sit with him, trailed by Neville Longbottom, who shuffles uncomfortably in the doorway with his toad in hand. He walks inside anyway after Draco's off-handed affirmation, his jaw set decisively. Lovegood seems fully oblivious, as expected, to the strained dynamic between the two of them. 

The train whistles, beginning to roll forward. It is a silent ride, for the most part, save for Lovegood and Longbottom's murmurs of conversation every now and then.

The world outside the pane of window is a haze of platforms, and then the spread of the city of London, and then the cloudy skies and verdant lands. Draco watches it all pass him by, his head full and distant, lips pressed into the ring on his knuckle.  
  


**…**

  
  
  


_The train's rumbling as it rolls down the tracks, an oddly soothing rhythm of a sound in the background of his senses. Draco slips in and out of his light slumber, the length of his body sprawled across the booth, suspended in a dreamy haze somewhere between awake and asleep. His hair is riding up against a lap. There are fingers trailing through his hair._

_He opens his eyes._

_Harry's looking out the window, watching the scenery blur by past. The orange-yellow lights of the sun set him sweet and aglow, lovelier than the sun itself, and all Draco can do is watch him, endlessly fixated._

_Harry glances down at him, and the colours catch in his eyes, blending yellow with green, casting his skin orange-golden. He smiles down at him, fingernails brushing against his scalp. He leans down and meets his lips with his own, closing them on Draco's upper lip in a gentle kiss._

_"We're still an hour away," Harry says, the hushed timbre of his voice melding with the metrical rumble of the engine. His hands in his hair, his body under his head, his face and voice over him, all of him amalgamate into home. "So go back to sleep, yeah?"_

_Draco rolls over onto his side, pulls one of Harry's arms across his shoulders, and he does just that._

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


"People are saying very unkind things about you," Lovegood points out, stroking a Thestral's fur. Draco has been able to see them since Fifth Year, but now many others at Hogwarts can as well, from the way several of the students are staring right at the creatures. They are mesmerizing and unsettling in equal measures to look at, gaunt and mystical.

He presses his lips together, watching the Thestrals feast on a dead bird. He had felt the stares on him as he'd moved through the corridors of the train, the hiss of whispers as he'd passed. "I had presumed."

"I don't agree with them, you know."

"Why not?"

She smiles, soft and ethereal. "My intuition is telling me you're not as bad as they're saying you are."

"Draco Malfoy."

It's his name. Just his name in a hushed voice. And then the voice registers in his mind and he stills, so still that all he can hear is the sound of winds, the sound of rustling leaves. The sound of soft kisses, of wild dancing and unbridled laughter.

Draco turns to look at him against the tremendous resistance of his own body.  
  


"So it _is_ true, then, what they're saying," Potter's voice is pleasantly surprised and bordering on bemused awe, his face splitting into a slow, blinding grin. "You came back."

Draco raises his chin and forces himself to maintain his gaze. "I did."

And then it's quiet, the two of them staring at each other. Potter's grin fades into a quirk at one corner of his lip, a glimpse of teeth between the teetering smile of his lips, his face fixed in an odd and studious little expression. 

It's a strange and heavy thing between them, this weight of what neither of them can acknowledge aloud. A memory of a moment, buried deep between them, and yet lingering all the same. A memory of a kiss and all that it meant, somewhere in their minds.

"Thought I saw you at the train station," Potter says, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets. "Thought I imagined it. You said you wouldn't come back."

"I didn't intend to," Draco says, clipped and short.

"And clearly you'd changed your mind," Potter lifts one hand out of his pocket to gesture at him, vaguely. "What did it?"

"My mother."

Ronald, Ginevra and Granger are calling out for Potter, beckoning him over. Ronald pauses and squints oddly when he catches sight of him, turning to Granger. Longbottom's jogging over to them, leaving Thomas and Finnigan behind.

"Looks like they're starting to take off, so I'll be going," Potter says, turning around slightly on his trainers. "See you at school."

When the chilled silence persists long enough for it to grow thick and uncomfortable, he nods uneasily, rubbing the back of his neck. "Er, right." He turns fully around, and then stops, and then turns back. With another smile, softer, he says, "I'm glad to see you here, Malfoy."

And then he walks away, waving a hand at him over his shoulder.

Lovegood and Longbottom get onto the Thestral carriages. Draco stares after him, unmoving for an infinite moment, his stomach tight and his heart erratic, pushed out of place within his skin. He vaguely hears Lovegood, calling for him to come onto the carriage with her and Longbottom.

He tears himself away when Potter reaches his carriage, climbing up onto it. Draco turns and does the same.

The thestrals rise up into the air, dragging them all up afloat. He watches the world grow miniscule as it grows distant, and is left with a sickening and cold feeling that he is not of it.

  
  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


After the Sorting Hat ceremony, the fresh batch of First Years all seated at the table of their respective Houses, Headmistress McGonagall announces the arrival of new staff wizards and witches. There's a new Muggle Studies teacher, Professor Alistair, as well as Professor Hardwood of DADA, a fairly young and somewhat handsome wizard, as well as somewhat unfortunate with the given surname. Seamus and Dean are already cracking jokes about it a few seats down from Harry, Ron snorting his Pumpkin Juice, Ginny laughing and Hermione eyeing them all with an unimpressed press of her lips.

There is Madam Aileen, a Mind-Healer assigned for those struggling with the aftermath of the war.

Hermione takes Ron's hand, looking at him pointedly.

"Yeah," Ron says, with a soft, fond huff. "Okay. I'll give it a go, if you want me to." Hermione smiles and kisses his freckled cheek, and he doesn't stop looking at her, tender, even when she turns away to face Harry and Ginny. 

"And Harry? Ginny?" Ginny nods, a squinch of her lips. Hermione turns to him. Harry pauses, wavering under her pleaful stare. "Please. Just give it a try, okay?"

Harry glances down at his plate of food, poking at a sausage. "I'll think about it."

"Give it a try, Harry," Ginny says, her hand taking a hold of his. "You don't talk to anyone about any of it. It could be good for you."

As Headmistress McGonagall's speech goes on, Harry glances over at the Slytherin Table, at Draco sitting with his chin on his palm, picking listlessly at his food. He hasn't looked up in all the time they've been here.

Very few of the Eighth Years have returned, and out of all of them, there are less than a handful of Slytherins, hence many of the seats at the table are empty. More than half of the table is occupied by the younger years, recently joined by First Years, who have been pale and afraid ever since their Houses were announced.

There's a First Year sitting beside Draco, quiet and boring holes into the table as she fidgets restlessly with the tablecloth. Draco looks at the brunette little girl, seeming to finally notice her as he arches a pale eyebrow. He puts down his utensil and bends his head close to her, saying something to her. The girl looks at his face, still void of much expression, but for a shrug. Her lips break into a smile, and then a giggle, her hand raising to her mouth. 

Hermione's voice cutting through the indiscernible chatter around him startles Harry.

"What?"

"I asked if you have decided what subjects you're going to be taking?"

"Er, yeah. Charms, Potions, DADA, Transfiguration and Herbology."

Ginny snorts. "I don't think it's to be an Auror anymore, is it?" 

Ron grins broadly, flicking a glance at Harry.

"Ah. No. Definitely not." Harry clears his throat, a flush running up his neck. "I don't want to relive that mortifying event every day for the rest of my life, thank you."

A memory filters in through his mind, white walls and a hospital bed. His own voice, asking, _So you do listen? Listen to everyone around you?_

_Not to everyone._

"Wait, you were serious?" Ron frowns, his head leaning over and his body against Hermione's to look at him properly. "You don't want to be an Auror anymore?"

"Not really, no." Harry throws him a remorseful glance. "Sorry, mate. I know we've been planning it since like, Second Year, but I just… _really_ want things to be quiet now, and I think, maybe, being a Healer could give me that."

Ron is clearly disappointed, but he sighs. "Yeah, alright. I get it. Not going to be the same without you, though." Ginny smirks, and exaggerates an _aww, look at them being all sweet_ at Hermione, who huffs a half laugh. "Shut up, Gin." He pauses, and then turns to Harry. "Honestly, you know, maybe I don't really want to be an Auror either."

Harry frowns. "Why not?"

"I've always imagined it to be the two of us." Ron shrugs. "It doesn't seem all that great when it'll just be me. And well, I _did_ think, if I wasn't going to be an Auror, I'd want to help George with the shop, so maybe… maybe I could go and do that instead."

Hermione nods, their hands entwined. "I think that's a great idea."

  
  


**…**

  
  
  


The new Eighth-Year Commons is a modest-sized expanse of area themed with colours of all Houses, a fireplace at the opposite end of the entrance door, which is guarded simply by a door that allows entry to only certain people and opens at the correct password. It is, essentially, a small central lounge opening into several dorm rooms.

Harry finds his name placed next to Seamus' on the _Rooming List For Eighth Year Students._ He was rather hoping he'd get to share with Ron, who has been paired with Dean. Maybe they could discuss switching roommates, which surely the other two parties would agree to. 

He searches for Hermione's name, who's being paired with Susan Bones.

His vision wanders down towards M. Malfoy, Draco. He'll be sharing a room with Neville.

Draco is, as of now, leaning sideways on an armchair as he waits the crowd of people out. All long legs crossed over the knee of the other, the cuff of sleeve at one wrist resting on the arm of the chair, the other hand curled loosely at his jaw. His fingers are flexing in thought, thumb running over the pads of his fingers.

And then Harry can't see him anymore, somebody sliding up in front of Draco and blocking his view of him.

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


"Why'd they let _you_ come back anyway?"

The words filter in through his thoughts, the shadow of a presence coming to loom above him. Draco lifts his head, blinking, his gaze flitting upward.

It's some red-headed boy with a yellow tie. Zacharias Smith, he recognizes after a rather long moment of looking at him, trying to place him. He hasn't been all too central to either of his lives.

"Ask the Headmistress, why don't you?"

"I'm asking _you._ " 

There's something else brimming along with his anger.

"How'd you manage it? Getting Potter fooled enough to take your side?" Smith snarls. There's a girl beside him, another Hufflepuff, touching his bicep and trying to steer him away, murmuring, _he's not worth it, Zach. Come on_. "It's the only reason they didn't throw you in Azkaban, isn't it? Potter's testimony? What'd you lie to him with to keep you out?"

Draco mouth twitches, thinned and flat. He keeps his back straightened, his shoulders tense, staring up at him impassively. He begins to stand to his feet, calmly, in an attempt to extricate himself from the situation.

And then Smith shoves at his chest, knocking his breaths out of his lungs. He collides hard to the back of the armchair with the force of it, a voice yelling, distant and detached from his mind. "Answer me!"

There's a fester of a sickening feeling spreading through his skin and chest. "Don't _—_ " His voice comes a strangled rasp, with a desperately controlled quivering. "Don't touch me _—"_

"Why, too good for it, Malfoy?"

 _Bearing a few conditions,_ McGonagall had written in her response letter. _He will be required to take Muggle Studies as one of the electives. He will see the school's Mind-Healer at a minimum of once every two weeks. He will cause no trouble to the other students, and I will ensure the same from others._

 _Where's that ensuring now,_ Draco thinks. His chest is rising and falling a little too fast, air not quite reaching his lungs. His hands are beginning to tremble around the arm of the chair.

"That fucking feral dog of yours. Greyback?"

And then Draco's veins go cold, his breaths frozen and high in his chest.

_"—he bit another one—in the papers yesterday—"_

The world is growing distant and foggy, the current of his own breathing, the unsteady and erratic movement of it, filling up his ears.

There's a memory, flash of pale hair and paler eyes, of canines, of the taste of blood, of a raw and hoarse throat, the sound of screaming and crying. There's a memory, hands on him, bruising and dirty, touch and collision. There's a memory, and a fester of a sickening feeling beneath his skin. The air that's left him is not quite coming back into his lungs again, and the stiffness of his body holds him down and still, holds his eyes down to the ground.

Smith is yelling again, shoving at him _—_

And then he's gone, a shadow of another body in front of him falling over his hazy vision. There's a voice somewhere afar, familiar and angry and wild, speaking fast and loud. " _Didn't hear him, Smith? — swear to Merlin, if you ever fucking touch him again, if_ anyone _does— "_

_"—defending a Death-Eater—"_

_"—Walk away, Smith_ , now _."_

"Malfoy?"

The voice is now closer. There's a face below him, the radiating heat of a body at his legs. He blinks, hard and rapid, focusing on it. On the green of eyes, bright and brilliant. On the ebony of hair. Dark brows. Glasses. Golden-brown skin. Lightning scar.

"It's alright," Potter murmurs. His hand is tentative and light on his arm, the warmth of him grounding. "It's alright. You're alright."

Draco is struck with fragments of memory, again, this time of an entirely different kind. 

Memories of Potter's arms and body around him in a hospital bed, warm and solid, and somewhere else in another world, morning after morning, night after night. Potter's hands under a frantic grip of his own, his voice whispering to him about a hundred different things to keep Draco's mind from a wand at his back, setting his broken body right. Somewhere else in another world, his hands holding his own without any thought, walking along his side, pulling him into dances, holding his face and kissing him soft and lovely.

The frantic beating of his heart begins to slow, settles into calm, climbs up into his throat. His breathing steadies, somewhat, his mind still foggy and hazy. He blinks hard a few times, gritty and heavy, and he's here, now, burning under many gazes and only focused on one, close and careful as they look up at him. He's here, now, at Hogwarts, eighteen years old and feeling older than decades, and yet younger than he is, all at the same time.

  
  


**…**

  
  
  


Ron eyes Neville across the booth at The Three Broomsticks. "So you're sharing a room with Malfoy." He grimaces. "Er. How's that going?"

Neville drinks a sip of his butterbeer. "How am I doing sharing a room with my former bully, you mean?"

There is an awkward silence. Ron shares an uncomfortable glance with Hermione, who sighs softly.

"Not the worst roommate I've had," Neville says, with a shrug. He has a newfound, quiet sort of confidence about him these days. It shows in the way he speaks. "We don't really talk. He keeps to himself mostly, now, and keeps to his side. Obsessively tidy about it, too."

Hermione stares at him, takes a sip of her butterbeer. When she pulls it away from her lips, there's a foamy mustache. "It… it doesn't bother you at all, then?"

"It did," Neville says. Ron is absently wiping his sleeve at Hermione's foamy mustache, most of his attention on Neville. "It still sort of does, but it was worse at first. Not afraid, but just… sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's a bit hard to shake that away, to be honest, but it's been a few days, and it didn't, and… well. Seems to me like there's a lot on everybody's minds these days, and he's no different. I guess he's not really up for being a prick anymore."

Ron raises his eyebrow. "Really? You have… no complaints? At all? This is _Malfoy_ we're talking about."

"Surprising, I know, but not really," Neville says. He pauses. "Well. This isn't exactly a complaint, just… weird, maybe. He does have some rather odd sleeping rituals…"

Ron frowns, bemused, and then narrows his eyes. "Do we want to know?" He looks over at Harry, and then turns to Hermione, who looks equally puzzled and unsure if she's interested. Harry, on the other hand, may be more curious than anything.

Neville snorts. "Nothing _too_ weird. It's just… I woke up this morning, casted a _Tempus_ and saw it was seven. I got out of bed, and it's completely dark. I'm really confused in my half-asleep state, wondering why it's so dark at seven in the morning, right? And why the hell is the sky _inside_ the dorm? Until I realized it was a spell. Not sure which one, but I guess some constellations spell. It was all kind of too refined to look real. Don't know what that's about, but...yeah."

Ron peers at him for a moment, and then snorts out a laugh. "Don't tell me it was the one after his own name." Neville stares at him, sips at his drink and shrugs. "Oh. Wow. Some things never change, eh? The sun might die, but the constancy of Draco Malfoy's narcissism never will."

Harry is thinking of Draco's wand in his hand, unicorn hair core and hawthorn wood. The smoothness and ease of his own magic passing into it, its complete obedience to him. He thinks of Draco's face, close to his own, starlights illuminating the silver of his eyes in the dimness of the night sky blanketing the hospital ceiling, full of something raw and hushed. The way they had followed Harry's smile. The way he'd smiled back at him, for the first time ever.

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  
  
  


There's Potions, first, where Harry and Hermione sit together, noting down the instructions on how to brew a Laughing Potion. He sits two seats behind Malfoy on the row to his left, notices him stare ahead at an empty space at the front of the classroom until Slughorn comes and fills its place, and then never lifts his head up again, only listening and taking notes.

Throughout the class, Harry keeps glancing up from his cauldron, vague thoughts of stars and night skies filling up his head, of conversations in hospitals, of a warm and soft body in his arms, of robe shops and a phantom kiss and a murmur against his lips every time he finds snow-blond hair and pale profile and a glimpse of silver eyes.   
  


**...**

  
  
  
  


On Wednesdays, Hagrid invites Harry, Ron and Hermione into the hut for tea. Then it's off to Quidditch practice for him and Ron, during which Harry gets to see Ginny as well. Then, around evening, after a shower and a change of clothes, they all go out to The Three Broomsticks.

Or, that's their usual Wednesdays. Today, Ron had asked Hermione on a date in Charms, after checking with Harry to see if he's alright with it being just the two of them for the day, to which Harry had said, _you guys don't need my permission to go on a date together, you know._ _If you need me to bugger off, just say so._ Then Ron had grinned, somewhat mellowed. _Well then, bugger off, Harry, because I want to go on a date with my wonderful girlfriend._

Harry had laughed. He loves them, but he doesn't mind hanging around on his own sometimes. He may have had, once, soon after having found his first makeshift family, after the Dursleys and after eleven years of having nobody, but now some part of him welcomes the liberty of solitude.

"Why don't you find Ginny, then? Take her out somewhere?" Ron asks, tying his tie. He frowns at the orange tie polka-dotted with purple, turning to Harry. "Looks kind of stupid with these robes, doesn't it?"

"Go with the blue and black one," Harry suggests, and then grins, shaping his voice into an absurdly dramatic, faint and drawn out sort of tone, like a lovesick girl, saying, "It brings out your eyes."

Ron laughs and complies, picking up the blue tie instead.

He puts it on, adjusting the formal robes. He'd borrowed it from Harry, so they're somewhat short on him, but he casts a few spells that resize it to his fitting. "Right. So. Go out with Ginny, yeah? Don't be alone."

"Yeah."

Harry finds himself dawdling around on his own instead, wondering why he can't seem to get himself to bridge this distance between him and Ginny these days. 

  
  
  


**...**

  
  
  


Draco idly brushes his fingers through the packs of sweets on the shelves, disinterest leadening any idea of purchasing any of it. It had been one of his favourite places to visit here, once. Not so much anymore, it seems.

He turns the corner of an aisle and freezes.

Potter's brows are furrowed in contemplation, picking out a handful of sweets as he peers at something else on the shelf, as if contemplating whether he wants to buy it or not. He turns, without lifting his gaze away from it, lingering indecisively. He finally tears away after a moment, looking up and ahead and then right at Draco, worn trainers halting to a stop.

"Oh. Er," Potter says, visibly caught off-guard. Then he smiles hesitantly at him. "Hello."

 _Oh fuck no,_ Draco thinks, and then promptly whirls around, preparing to make a getaway.

"Wait!" Potter exclaims. Draco does not. There's rustles and multiple thumps from behind him, Potter putting away everything in his hands on the closest aisle. "Malfoy!"

When it's clear that he'll be following him right out the door, Draco whips around, Potter nearly running right into him.

"Where are your friends, Potter?"

Potter blinks, bemused. He's pushing his slightly skewed glasses up with his fingers. "They're… on a date? Because they're dating? I don't know if you knew that _—"_

"I don't care," Draco cuts him off. "I only ask because if they were here, then surely you'd be bothering them instead of me."

Potter's brows furrow. He shakes his head. "I'm not trying to bother you. I just… I didn't think I'd ever see you again after…" He stops, a flicker of something passing through his face. He clears his throat. "I just want to know how you're doing."

"We aren't friends."

"No?" Potter says, his dark brows drawing together. "I mean, I thought, after everything at St. Mungos…" After he'd spent months at Draco's bedside, keeping him sane. Potter leaves it at that, however, a bit awkwardly. It is a small mercy. Draco has no desire to think about _everything_ , and certainly not about the after, and surely neither does Potter. His lips twitch at the corners in a tentative smile. "I just reckon that's more than enough reason for us to be now."

He really doesn't get it, then. Either that, or he's pretending to be clueless. 

But that doesn't sound like Potter, does it? Cruel and pretending, knowing exactly what it is that he's doing and still standing here with his wild ebony curls and his bright green eyes and his breath of a smile. He's more likely to be genuinely clueless.

Potter's gaze flickers in nervous confusion. "Why are you looking at me like that?" 

"What, like you're an idiot?" He's adamantly trying not to think about what else might have slipped onto his traitorous face. He takes a step behind on his shoes, hands pushed into the pockets of his overcoat. "It's because you are one."

Draco turns around, then, walking down the streets where he came from. Potter's following gaze is burning on his back, twisting him inside and out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **References:**
> 
> _"You heard that?" Potter asks, looking at him._
> 
> _"I listen." Draco shrugs._
> 
> _"You do?" Potter straightens, seeming somewhat stiff. "Listen to everyone around you?_
> 
> _..._
> 
> _"Not to everyone."_
> 
>   
> *The constellations spell was mentioned in the ninth chapter of the first part, which Harry had used to try and calm Draco down from his fear of wands.


	3. Chapter 3

Reading the conditions outlined in the Headmistress' letter, of being required to see the school's Mind-Healer, had begged the question of what exactly Draco's mother had disclosed for her to be imposing such a condition. 

"You've told her," he'd said to her, not looking at her as the letter crumpled in his fist.

"I've told her just enough," was what his mother had responded with.

 _Just enough for her to let me in only out of pity_ , he'd been about to say. He'd felt angry, throbbing hot and dull through his veins. But he'd lifted his head and taken one look at her, had looked upon her thinness and frailty and all the hard months on her, how she contrasted with the way he remembered her in his Dreams, and had found himself unable to express it, but for an aversion of his cold gaze, a tightening of his jaw, a quiet snarl.

Draco's first mandatory visit to the school's Mind-Healer's office is merely introduction, a series of personal questions building up into a whole life story that trails off at the events of the past year, at the war on the very Hogwarts they sit together in. 

He goes quieter. His answers become shorter. His gaze becomes lower, the tremor of his hands repressed around the arms of the chair. She notices it all, and where it tangles together.

"What happened to you last year, Draco?" Madam Aileen asks, her face mellow and careful.

Draco's jaw tightens. "This isn't working."

"Whatever you tell me, Draco, I am under a binding oath to not allow it to leave this room."

He doesn't say anything more. She waits for a moment, and then nods, her lips squinched. Then she lets him go six minutes early.

**…**

  
  
  


" _Ostendam Astronomia_."

The closed ceiling expands into open skies. Draco lowers the wand, a tremor in his hand, in his chest, but the spell comes easy to him now despite it all. He puts the wand inside the drawer and closes it. He lays down on the bed, stretching his body across the mattress. He stares up at the scatter of stars above him, folds his arms over his abdomen. The chokehold in his throat relaxes into freer inhales and exhales of air.

 _See that? That's you up there._ He thinks of an arm around his abdomen. Lips at his cheek, his jaw, his shoulder. The high night sky above a Quidditch field, a half-moon amongst the stars. A kiss to his lips, slow and soft. _Draco._

"Why do you do this?"

The cut through the pure silence startles him.

He and Longbottom don't talk, ever. Both of them stay out of the dorm most of the days and come back only at night, one before the other and always in quiet.

"Is there a problem?" Draco asks, an insouciant near-drawl. He doubts it's really all too bothersome. It's dark enough, isn't it, and Longbottom's thick curtains block out much of the light. Draco keeps his own open, because he does not like the way they close him in.

"No problem." Longbottom's voice is careful and slow. "I'm only curious."

"I don't like closed spaces."

"Oh." It seems the conversation's ended there when there isn't further response, to Draco's relief, until, "Luna doesn't like closed spaces either."

Draco is not sure why _Longbottom_ is sharing this with him. 

"Luna was a captive in your Manor. In your basement. Did you know that? She said you weren't there, so I don't know if you do." 

Draco's throat bobs, transfixed on the biggest glowing star. He didn't know this.

"They hurt her, bad, with the Cruciatus Curse on repeat. Your aunt. Your father." Draco's chest tightens, his breaths high in his chest, trying to hold it steady. He knows his father had done terrible things, but to know he'd hurt a girl only as old as himself, just as Rowle and Greyback had _—_ "It's why when I saw her walk into your compartment in the train, I was terrified of how she'd feel, seeing you there."

Draco outlines the dragon's head in the sky. He and Luna are something like friends now, as they spend time together every few days, but suddenly he isn't so sure they should be. "I didn't do anything to her."

He doesn't realize his breathing sounds so loud in the room until Longbottom's voice lightens slightly, "I'm not saying you did. But honestly? I do worry that maybe she sees you and remembers your family, being captive in your home."

If Luna does, Draco doesn't know. She acts just fine around him, besides her usual eccentricity. His throat convulses. "Why are you telling me all of this?"

"Because she likes you. She thinks you're lovely, but she thinks that about anybody that talks to her. And no offense, Malfoy, but speaking from experience, you're not the loveliest bloke I've ever known. You keep to yourself more now, and that's all I know. I don't really know who you are, if you aren't your father's son. She's been through enough, so… fair warning. You do anything to hurt her..."

"I'm not my family."

He can hear Longbottom draw a breath, slow and quiet, after a contemplative moment. "Okay. I'll take your word for it, for now, very loosely." There's a long pause, long enough that it seems it's over. "Can I ask where you were last year, then? You weren't at Hogwarts, so I'd have thought you'd be home."

There is no answer. The endless silence overtakes the room once more.

  
  
  


**...**

  
  
  


Luna's going on about Blibbering Humdingers, whatever those are. Draco walks alongside her on the grounds of Hogwarts, humming in acknowledgment and interjecting every now and then. Giving a proper verbal response would surely require understanding much of what she's saying.

"I like being outside as well," Luna says, then, with a smile, perhaps having noticed his wandering eyes around the surroundings. The fallen autumn leaves. The sway of the high branches on trees. The winds. "I'd missed it very much there."

Draco stills, coming to a slow halt. Luna stops with him.

She frowns. "What's wrong, Draco?"

"Do you get reminded of them?" Draco finds himself asking, almost mindlessly, already wishing he could take the words back from the air. "When you see me?"

"You don't remind me of them. I think you're better than where you came from." She smiles, then, and looks at him, reaching for his hand. "And I'm very glad you're here, Draco." 

He withdraws it from her. She stares at him for a moment. "Sorry. I don't…"

Luna shakes her head, folding her hands at her front. "Oh, that's alright. I don't get offended very easily."

He watches his shoes, the way they misplace soil under the nettles of grass. She continues on walking, then, prompting Draco to as well.

"I don't quite like wands very much anymore," Luna says, a little out of nowhere. "But that's okay." She lifts a hand at the line of flowers beside her as she walks along them. They break off, swirl up into the air and weave themselves into a circle of flowers. "I don't really need one."

Draco blinks, and then huffs, mildly awed. "Wandless magic."

Luna's smile widens, and she nods. 

"Will you teach me?"

She takes the circle of flowers from the air, stands on her bare toes and places it on his head. "I'll teach you."

**…**

Heading back to his dorm at night, Draco crosses by the sight of Potter and his friends sitting by the fireplace across the lounge, a ruckus of laughter and conversation amongst them. 

Ginevra is holding Potter's hand. She is looking at Granger and Ronald across from her as she speaks, gesturing with her free hand as she supposedly tells them a humorous story, Potter staring on at her with the lingering grin of prior laughter.

Draco blinks, a furrow twitching into his forehead of its own accord. He continues walking back to his dorm.

He goes inside his room, stops at the desk. He pushes his trembling fists onto the top of the desk and closes his eyes, breathing through something festering sick in him, something in him rearing ugly and bitter and cold.

Draco slowly settles down on the chair once he's forced his mind blank and decides to write a response letter to his mother. Her last owl had been yesterday, asking him of his well-being, of his classes, sending him homemade desserts. She'd asked about Potter as well, as she did in every letter.

_Dear Mother,_

_Thank you for the desserts. Everything is well with me, as I hope they are for you. Don't fret about me. I'm getting better._

_Potter's fine._

_Love,_

_Draco_

Draco settles in bed and casts the constellations spell. He watches the night swirl up into the ceiling. There's a memory, a voice murmuring, _It's alright._

_It's alright. Just—look._

_There. That's you up there, isn't it?_

Sleep creeps upon Draco like a surprise, without him knowing or expecting, his head full of dreams of a brighter and more beautiful world. Of bright green eyes. Of a hand around his. Of a smile, following him into sleep. 

The dream shifts to a small and closed room, a grey and dark room. A hand around his throat, around his bicep, around his body. Pale hair and paler eyes, canines and claws, and the sound of his own screaming inside his mind.

He snaps awake to hands on his shoulders, shaking him awake, somebody yelling, " _Malfoy!"_

Draco shoves the hands off, shoves at a body in the dark, frantic and desperate and blind. He gasps for air, his throat hoarse and raw. His brain is foggy, his body languid and heavy, exhaustion making him all numb and drowsy. Then there's light, a face coming into his vision through the pinch in his gaze, through the blur and grit, his chest heaving. Slowing.

"Malfoy. Hey." Potter. Always him. Always showing up. The farther Draco tries to run from him, the closer he comes crashing. His bleary gaze focuses clearer on his tired face. "It's alright. You're alright. You're safe."

There are murmurs and whispers permeating throughout the room.

"Nothing to see here!" Potter shouts, loudly, over his shoulder. "Go back to bed, everyone."

There's a chorus of a shuffle, a scatter of confused grumbling, and then quiet.

"Leave me," Draco mumbles, pushing at Potter's hands, his chest, his own hands too heavy to move much.

Potter doesn't leave. He slides off the mattress, and instead settles down beside his bed on the floor. He adjusts on his legs, his chin cushioned on his arm, and then begins to talk. His voice is quiet and rough with lingering slumber, the sound of soft kisses, of wild dancing and unbridled laughter filling his head.

When Draco wakes up, once again, somewhere in the dark of the night and under the dim starlights of the constellations spell that he doesn't remember casting for a second time, there is nobody at the floor of his bedside. 

He wonders if he'd only dreamed it all.

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


"I don't want to go." Ron looks like a kicked crup, walking up the stairs to the third floor alongside Harry to begrudgingly meet up with Hermione at the library. "Merlin, save me."

She'll force them into doing their homework and studying for upcoming tests, or at least she will to Harry on the latter, trying to persuade him to begin preparing for his NEWTs _while you still have all this time_ , and it's only the start of the term. She's easier on Ron now, after hearing of his plans to help George at the shop after graduation, but only marginally so because _you should always perform your best at everything, Ron, regardless_ , when he points out that he doesn't need any of this, that he's only sticking around for her and Harry this year _._

They walk a few paces down the corridor, and then turn a corner. They pass by several crowds of students, all of them watching Harry, murmuring, some girls giggling. Ron shifts in line with him, as if to keep him from their disconcerting line of vision.

"What's up with you and Malfoy?"

Harry blinks, caught off-guard at the abrupt upbringing of the topic. "What's up with me and Malfoy?"

"Twice." Ron holds up two fingers to enunciate. "In our one week here, you went running for him _twice_ , like some _—_ I dunno, some bloody knight in shining armour. Everybody's confused, making up some rather bonky stuff. Some are pissed at _you_ for it, and others afraid to even look at him wrong, from what Dean's told me. And I mean… yeah, you know. You did sort of go barmy on Smith."

Harry thinks that could just as well be due to Headmistress McGonagall's wrath in the aftermath. Smith's gotten off with a final warning, and any further strikes will result in immediate expulsion. He has also been banned from Hogsmeade trips for the rest of the year and will be serving detention until Christmas Holidays. 

He raises an eyebrow, staring ahead. He vaguely notices his own speeding pace as he walks down the corridors towards the Hogwarts Library. "So? Smith was being a right bastard to him."

Ron shrugs. "He was, yeah. But… Speaking for Malfoy at his trial was one thing, and maybe even spending months in a hospital with him when he didn't have any of his family with him, but…"

Harry halts to a stop, turning to him. "Did you see him, Ron? When Smith was shoving at him? And then, last night—"

Ron looks bemused. "What are you getting so defensive for?"

Harry blinks, realizing the tension that's seeped into his body, inexplicably. He forces himself to relax. "I'm not. I just… you're bombarding me with all these questions, and it's catching me off guard. Just... what are you even trying to say anyway?"

Ron twists a corner of his lips. "I don't know. I mean, you're always looking at him, like in Sixth Year, except it can't be because you think he's up to something. He's hardly even _up,_ most of the time." 

He's referring to Draco's tired demeanour nowadays. Harry's caught him sleeping fairly often, on the library desks or on the couch of an empty Eighth Year Commons in the midst of sleeping sessions, his books hanging off of his hands, and sometimes even in the midst of an ongoing lecture.

"I'm not looking at him all the time."

Ron lets it go, but Harry gets the feeling that it's more out of not wanting to argue than that he believes him. "So you're just worried about him?"

"Yeah."

"Hm."

"What, _hm_?"

"Nothing. I just said _hm_."

"You said it some way."

"Still getting defensive, then," Ron mutters, and then clears his throat. "It just feels like you're still in that mindset, you know? Like at St. Mungos. Like you still think you have to… to be there for him or something. I just don't think you have to anymore."

The rest of the walk takes place in silence.

...  
  
  


Tiredness creeps up on Draco again, slow and unsuspected, after days of snatching little sleep, his head either full of dreams or full of nightmares. Pepper-Up potions keep him going through classes, even if he can't entirely sit still, feels his head splitting apart with constant irritation, and is tired and jittery all the time.

On Monday, Draco finds his body heavier, drained of energy even despite the stronger dosage of Pepper-Up, feels uneasy tenfold on this particular day. It all comes to a head in Charms, his head spinning and light, colours dancing in his vision, and then everything goes black. 

He wakes up in the Hospital Wing, Madam Pomfrey hovering above him, a furrow between her brows.

Draco blinks, groggy and heavy. "What...?"

"You fainted," Madam Pomfrey says. _Fainted?_ Draco is held down by the leaden weight of his own body and head, and so cannot express his distaste beyond an annoyed scowl. "Your vitals are all off-kilter. Have you been getting proper food and sleep, Mr. Malfoy?"

Draco hasn't been sleeping well, certainly. He finds that he can't remember the last time he ate either, except for a vague memory of sitting at the Great Hall, staring down at his food that he can't remember if he ate any of or not. "Of course I have been sleeping and eating."

"It doesn't seem so, judging by the look of you," she says disapprovingly. "I'll have to keep you here for the day, perhaps a few more. Nutrition, revitalising and strengthening potions three times a day should make you good as new, as well as a long, magically-induced rest."

"No you won't," Draco grits out, and then tries to get up, pushing onto his hands and feet. For Merlin's sake, he can't stand a repeat of St. Mungos again, confined to bed for hours on end. "I'm not staying here for bloody _days_ and I'm _not_ letting you _—_ "

Madam Pomfrey raises an eyebrow, pushing him down with one hand. His head is spinning again. He clenches his eyes shut, trying to make it stop. "I don't believe you have much of a choice, young man, seeing as you can hardly get up of your own accord."

She leaves, when he huffs exasperatedly and slumps back down. Then comes somebody else through the curtains.

_Oh for Salazar's…_

"I brought 'Mione's duplicated notes," Potter announces as he shuffles in through the curtains, stacks of papers under his arm. He drops them down beside Draco with a thud.

"Why are you here?"

"Hello to you too. You aren't eating or sleeping."

"And you aren't my mother."

"No. I'm not." Potter says. He hesitates. "But I do worry about you."

"Why?"

He pauses for a long time, a long silence stretching out between them. "We _were_ something there, weren't we? Somewhat friends."

Draco stares up at the ceiling, heaving a slow breath. He hasn't looked at Potter, still, and he isn't planning to.

"Nothing borne of pity is real."

"This isn't pity." He sighs. "Look, full disclosure, I spent too much of my life doing things I didn't want to do to invest myself into things I don't care for. So can we not do this again? This whole… you pushing me away thing. It was tiring then, and it's tiring now."

"Whatever, Potter. If you want to sit here and stare at nothing for several hours on end next to my bed-bound body again, suit yourself."

Potter puffs an exasperated breath. "Are you mad at me for something? For what? For not..."

He halts his words there, like he meant to say it aloud and then lost his nerve at the last second. The lingering and heavy weight of it, the unsaid, the memory, weighs heavier between them in the silence that follows, draping over them suffocatingly with the tautness of its tension. There's a scuffle, Potter's head turning away, his body turning into the curtains in his peripheral, like he's about to walk out. Except he doesn't. Except he turns back around.

"What do you like to eat?"

Draco raises an eyebrow, a slight sneer on his face. "What do I like to eat?" he repeats flatly.

"Yes. What do you like to eat?"

Potter leaves a moment after, when he is ignored. Draco pushes himself up into a sitting position, back against the pillows, his spine aching and his back muscles throbbing with the echoes of a broken body, fatigue laying thick over his bones. It feels a little less like being trapped inside of himself, sitting up like this. He reaches for the notes, reading through them, trying to, but his foggy and drowsy brain isn't cooperating much.

Potter returns some indiscernible amount of time later, the scent of food wafting in through air. Draco's stomach churns, hollow and completely disinterested.

"Good, you didn't run away. Well, you didn't tell me what you wanted, so I brought a bit of everything, fresh out of the kitchens." Potter drops down in front of him, next to his outstretched feet. He begins to lay it out on the little space beside Draco. Two roast beef and corn sandwiches, crumpets, caramel pudding and treacle tarts. "I missed breakfast, and I'm famished, so without further ado, please, your Highness..." He waves a hand at the set-up with a brandish.

Draco snorts, tearing his gaze away from it and back onto the notes on his lap. "Really, Potter." 

" _Really,_ Malfoy." Potter picks up something and holds it out to him. "I do know you like this a lot."

Draco glances up briefly from his notes to look at what 'this' is. Caramel pudding. He looks back down at the pages, reading through the applications and effects of Porcupine quills, or trying to. "And how do you know that?"

"We _have_ gone to school together for seven years, if you didn't notice," he says, as if that explains anything. "Come on. Eat with me."

"If you believe demanding me to _—"_

"I'm not demanding. I'm asking. Please."

At that, Draco makes the mistake of looking up at him, finally, and is stuck on brilliant green eyes, on the ebony of his curls falling against the hinge of his battered glasses, on the golden-brown of his skin alight in the day.

In this dim and grey world now, he is the only thing that is still as bright and beautiful as his dreams. Still the most beautiful boy he's ever seen. From a boy in a robe shop to the boy sitting here in front of him. From a boy in a robe shop to a man he'd spent a faux life with sitting beside him, holding his hand.

Draco bites his lip as he glances away, and then scoffs, exasperated perhaps more at himself than anything, at his fool of a heart. He turns back and takes the plate from Potter's hand. He doesn't look at him again for fear of his transparency.

"Sixth Year," Potter says after a moment. He coughs awkwardly, looking like he's not sure if he should be discussing this. Draco isn't so sure either. "I noticed in Sixth Year. It was almost the only thing you ate that year."

"When you were stalking me."

"I wouldn't call it stalking, just… cautiously watching."

"It _is_ generally considered stalking if you noticed that nearly the only thing your victim ate that year was caramel pudding."

There's a flush spreading up Potter's neck. "Alright, fair point. But _victim_?"

Draco shrugs. "What else shall I call myself?" 

Potter shakes his head. "You're making me sound like a murderer."

"Is that not where it nearly ended?"

The atmosphere became sombre, then.

"I'm sorry," Potter says, painfully, sincerely contrite, after a long moment. "I… I had no idea what it would do."

"And you used it anyway?"

"It was stupid. I know. I stopped using the book I found it from right after."

Draco hums, sardonically. "Smart of you."

"Did it scar?"

"It did." But now there are many other scars to replace them, hidden underneath, and so it hardly matters. He doesn't say this. 

But Potter's expression is wrecked anyway. "Merlin, Malfoy, I'm..."

"You should have brought fruits," Draco cuts him off with sharply, not in the mood to carry on _this_ conversation.

Draco takes a spoonful. He tastes nothing. But somehow, having Potter in front of him makes it easier to let it settle, the sight of him that makes the unreachable and intangible malaise in him settle down into a calm and ease and _okay, everything is okay._

Potter dips his head down at his sandwich, mumbling, "you didn't tell me what you wanted." Then he breathes a soft sigh. They don't talk for the rest of the quarter of an hour.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The process of Mind-Healing won't be a focus in the story. I wanted to use it as a method for glimpsing into the way Draco feels after waking up.
> 
> References:
> 
> * _...He looks to the sky again and raises the wand slightly, only quivering now. "Draco." He sees Malfoy's head twitch slightly in his direction at the sound of his first name. It occurs Harry that he's never said it out loud, not in front of him at least._
> 
> _The stars dispersed without pattern begin to rearrange themselves, forming the clear shape of a large, exotic dragon head._
> 
> _"There," Harry says softly. "That's you up there, isn't it?"_
> 
> *A dream memory:  
>  _"See that? That's you up there," Harry whispers into his ear, cheek to the side of his head. He's pointing at a pattern in the sky, that if looked closely, resembles a great dragon's head. "Draco."_
> 
> (Chapter Nine)


	4. Chapter 4

Harry's brain keeps running through the unpleasant scene in the infirmary.

So from here on, he resolves to reduce his encounters with Draco, seeing as his company clearly isn't welcome. It wasn't at St. Mungos either, but that had been a far different matter than what it is now. On top of that, it's difficult to interact with Draco when he seems so terribly cross with him. He isn't even sure why he is, because he wasn't cross with him before their return to Hogwarts, was he?

But that might have been because he'd been confessing his feelings to him then.

Harry finds the idea confusing and difficult to grapple with. It seems a distant thing, for the most part, and to test out the thought feels like a mere recited fact that he understands nothing of, like rehearsed words detached from his comprehension. And the memory, returning in sporadic moments, but still too surreal and dreamy most of the time, impenetrable to the film of uneasy skepticism over his mind.

More than anything, it's a jar that he's put away somewhere into the deepest corners of a shelf, simply because he doesn't know what to do with it. He knows it's there, but that's all there is to it.

To imagine Draco Malfoy having any such feelings for him for any length of time—when he's never given the slightest indication in the past nor so in the present—it's difficult to imagine at all. There are times, at night in particular as the memory plays in his mind over and over, when the questions come, all the whys and the hows, but it leaves him reeling and exhausted and eventually he gives up trying to work out anything.

The only line of reasoning that makes even a lick of sense for Draco's sudden cold shoulder is that Harry doesn't return his feelings, and Draco is aggrieved by this. But Draco said, in the hospital, that he'd always known this, and surely it means that he doesn't expect Harry to reciprocate what he can't feel. He's only ever been into girls, after all. He's with Ginny.

He doesn't believe this needs to come between their somewhat friendship either, but it seems Draco doesn't agree with him on that. Harry can't deny that he is inexplicably, intensely drawn to the other boy, seemingly without a name nor reason for why he is, but he is. Perhaps he's grown some sort of attachment to him during their time at St. Mungos, or perhaps he's still in some mindset like Ron had said, desperately needing to ensure Draco is doing alright after all that had happened, or perhaps it's because Draco's always been something of an integral part of his life, even if as an enemy, and he'd just like him to be an integral part of his life as a friend now. Draco, however, seems adamant on avoiding him like the plague.

It occurs to him that Draco might just be embarrassed, and angry for it. In that case, Harry doesn't know what to do. He remembered wishing he'd come back after he'd left, the way the want tugged in his gut, but it hardly feels like Draco has at all when he won't even look at him unless Harry's imposing his presence on him.

**...**

  
  


Draco clasps his hands over the cross of his legs. "Have you heard of the Daydream Potion?" 

He has a lot of questions. He'd tried getting them answered by searching through books in the Hogwarts Library, but there wasn't much information available beyond what he already knew. The subject of interest seems to have much to do with the mind. So, surely a Mind-Healer would know something about it.

Madam Aileen sits across from him, on the other side of her desk. Her arms are folded atop it, in a clinically attentive sort of posture. "It gives the user realistic and vivid dreams of all they desire, but leaves them severely comatose in the external world. Why do you ask?"

"Because it was given to me," Draco tells her. He lets that sink in for a moment, seeing her expression of moderate, controlled bewilderment. "What do you know of it?"

"That it is extremely rare," she says. "That it is of love at its core. Moreover, it is of longing. Hence the cure, the tears of those you crave love of."

"Pardon me, but you're not telling me anything I don't already know, Madam Aileen."

"Frankly, it's not something within my specialty. Mind-Healers of a higher level would be more suited to help you with this, but there's no reason why you can't still talk to me about it."

"Hm." There is a brief pause. "And how will they be able to help me?"

"You might undergo therapy, by high-tier Mind-Healers that have studied the effects of the potion and how to tackle such complications. This is considerably slow and taxing, I must admit, when compared to Permanent Partial Obliviation."

Draco's interest is peeked at this. He straightens in his chair. "And that is?"

"Exactly what it sounds like. Removing a selected memory, or memories, permanently."

Draco takes a moment to absorb the idea of this. "What makes this different from what any educated wizard can achieve?"

Madam Aileen shifts on her folded hands, thoughtful. "Well... what we talk about here, Mister Malfoy, is something far more thorough and complex, indeed. We are talking about erasing an entire set of memories so thoroughly that not even the faintest trace of familiarity is left behind. This can involve erasing the memory of certain people as well, particularly ones that featured most in your dreams."

Draco can do nothing but stare at her for a long moment, perched on the edge of his seat, hands tight around the arms of the chair. There is hope brewing in his chest, even against all the odds, that he most likely can't afford such services, or the trek of searching for someone who can help him in such a way.

Or the sudden conflict slipping into his chest, stretching taut and tight, at the thought of forgetting all his joy and good and comfort.

Forgetting Harry.

 _And_ _forgetting Potter,_ he is reminded. Potter, who is calm and comfort and still the only thing that makes even a bit of sense in a world that's grown a stranger to him, but who now also means to him everything that he will never have, who means to him all his love turned to grief, and the impossibility of a dream that hurts worse when he's already seen all that it could be.

"Are you considering?" Madam Aileen questions. "There are several services I can recommend for you to look into, though you may require the means to travel to the aforementioned countries."

Draco is currently on probation, so travelling isn't possible anyhow at the moment. Most likely, he will wait until after graduation, if only for his mother's sake, before he can take any steps towards this.

"Perhaps some day," Draco says. He settles back down in his chair. He pauses for a moment, throat convulsing. He darts a glance away, and then down at the top of the desk. His jaw shifts. "And what of the other things I'd—that I'd like to forget? Things unrelated to the dreams?"

She eyes him closely, studying him. It's when he begins to waver slightly under her scrutiny that she nods. "I imagine it is possible."  
  


**…**

  
  


"What happens to those who don't love and crave?"

Madam Aileen shrugs. "Everybody loves and craves. Fame and fortune. Status and talent. All things you can love and crave, can't you? But as far as I know, it isn't for those who don't love and crave a _person_. The cure is impossible for them, so they die."

A chaffinch sings outside the window. He wishes, just for a moment, that he hadn't loved and craved a person either.

"But you are awake." Madam Aileen is eying him carefully. Her lips flicker, not quite a smile, but something like it. "So who did you love there?"

"Why do you need to know that?"

"I don't." Her lips grow into a smile, something to mollify him. "But gradually easing into the things I would need to know can create a level of comfort. You don't have to answer anything you don't want to. Is it romantic?" Draco affirms. "Is she here? At Hogwarts?"

He wonders how she'll react, hearing of his preferences. It's not as if she can break her magically binding oath, if he did tell her. He cocks his head, an apathetic sort of curiosity overtaking him. "Yes he is." 

"Oh," she says. Her face doesn't change beyond an apologetic twitch of her face. "I'm sorry for presuming. He must care for you, if he cried for you."

Draco looks down. He traces a foggy fingerprint on the top of the desk, watching idly. "He cares for everyone. Even those he has no reason to care for." He supposes pity is the better word when it comes to what Potter feels for him, but saying this might tell her more than he'd like for her to know.

"To cry for a person is one of the purest expressions of caring," Madam Aileen says. "Surely it means something." When there is no acknowledgment of her point, she continues, "What is it like, waking up again?" 

If he looks up, he will see the daylight streaming in, blazing yellow and white over the room, casting shadows beneath objects. Outside the window, there's greenery on the plains and prairies, the white of clouds, the distant grey-brown of mountains. He can see colours, but they all seem interspersed with an empty, dim grey. All his other senses seem to have faded as well, like everything has a hazy film over it that he can't reach through. Everything was so bright and vivid there, in his Dreams. It's like nothing here can ever come close.

"Grey."

"Surely it's not all grey," Madam Aileen says. Draco arches an brow, looking up at her, and wonders if she doesn't understand how literally he means this, if she thinks he's speaking in metaphors. "Surely there's something of colour in your life? Even just one?"

Draco questions momentarily if he's only wasting his time speaking to her about any of this.

And then he thinks of brilliant green eyes. He thinks of the ebony of wild, unruly curls. He thinks of glowing golden-brown skin. A faded, grey lightning scar. A quirk of a pink smile. He feels the foolishness and fragility of his own heart, the way it beats down into his gut.

"Just one," Draco says, quietly.

  
  


...

Somewhere around midnight, Draco wakes up with a rapid heartbeat, scrambles out of sweat-soaked bed-sheets, unable to bear the mattress against his body, the silence, the walls around him, the dim starlights not enough to overpower the darkness falling on him.

In trying to find a place to breathe easy, he ends up at the empty Quidditch pitch, right in the middle of it, watching real stars high up in the sky. The world is quiet, but open in front of him, reminding him that he's free. He turns the wireless on in his hand, tunes it and changes stations until he can hear the grainy and soft singing of an old song, a woman's voice. He puts it next to his head.

He breathes through the weight pushing down on his lungs, trying to follow a rhythm, trying to follow a voice, a comfort, a too bright and vivid memory of a solid chest and a still arm around his back.

There's a scuffle of a sound some feet away. Draco snaps upright.

"Who's there?"

The scuffle stills. Without his wand, or essentially his magic, he feels more vulnerable.

"Show yourself!"

And then Potter appears, as if from behind a cloak falling off. He raises one hand, the other holding the now visible cloak to his abdomen. "Sorry. It's just me."

Draco's still having trouble breathing, blinking furious and hard, his chest heaving.

"I was wandering around the castle. Saw you out here, so…" Potter steps forward, once, twice, the soil and leaves rustling under his trainers. When he's reached Draco, he lowers to sit beside him, pulls his knees up. His arms are still clutching the cloak to his chest. "What are you doing out here anyway?"

"Don't stop on my account, Potter," Draco lies back down on the grassy embankment, ignoring his question. "Keep on wandering."

He can't muster the heat or energy to be proper scathing at the moment, and perhaps this is why Potter, the damned bastard, scoots downward and lies beside him as well, albeit with a great deal of distance between them. He shifts around, getting comfortable, and then faces up at the stars.

There's another old song on the wireless now, playing between their heads in the silence.

Potter's lips raise at a corner in a half-smile. Draco wants to ask what he's smiling about, but that would give away the fact that he's been looking at him this entire time.

"This is muggle music, you realize." Potter's transfixed on the stars, Draco on the lights in his eyes.

He feels strange, a bit off-kilter, having Potter so close and next to him, even despite the distance. He feels it a bit harder to breathe, but now for an entirely different reason. "I'm well-aware."

Draco's mind is racing to the background noise of a grainy tune, the beating of his heart gone haywire, and Potter, as always, oblivious to it all. 

When the song ends, Potter asks, "So you listen to it, then? Muggle music?"

There are a lot of things Draco thinks he could be saying rather than a tepid, "Preferable to Celestina Warbeck, I should say."

Potter laughs, and Draco's heart kicks up further into a storm for a whole minute after. "I can't argue with that." He turns to glance at Draco, stilling to eye him in a curious and studious sort of way.

It's two songs later that Potter dozes off, right there next to him, and Draco sees them from the eyes of the night sky, the image of Potter asleep stark in the middle of an enormous pitch, Draco not far behind. When his heart finally comes to a steady pace, the storm, the turmoil, of his body settles to calm, to a deep and aching tenderness in the spaces between his bones. His eyes fall shut to the stars, the sound of Potter's breathing soft and steady beside him.

Sleep comes to claim Draco in its tide, a quiet, distant memory playing its song well into his dreams, a hand sliding over his own in a bright daylight, a hand warm on the middle of his back, the two of them leading his feet into the spin of a dance.

On the wireless, somebody keeps on singing between their heads.

  
  
  


**…**   
  
  


_"I don't believe in love at first sight, you know," Harry says, squinting at him upside down._

_They're lying on the Quidditch pitch after a fly, bodies sprawled in opposing directions, but with their faces right in front of each other's. The skies above them are grey in the morning, only a forecast of the oncoming rain as of now._

_Draco's brow twitches upward. "You don't?"_

_Harry shrugs, arms clasped around his abdomen. Four years since Draco's met him now, and he's still as much of a wonder. "How can you just look at a person and fall in love? You have to know a person before you can feel anything for them."_

_"Hm. I'd thought the same thing once, you know," Draco eyes him closely, pointedly. "But sometimes, you can look at somebody and just know."_

_Harry huffs wryly. "Still sounds like a load of bollocks to me."_

_"You should believe in it."_

_"Why should I?"_

_"Because you walked in and I thought I'd never seen anyone as beautiful."_

_Harry doesn't say anything. He's stilled fully, only looking at him. The winds whip around his hair, making it wilder, and his gaze is roving down over Draco's face, mouth to eyes. He dampens his lips, bites them to hold back a smile that slips through anyway. He suddenly seems a little shy of him, turning his head away slightly, a faint pink flush spreading from his neck to his cheeks as he breathes a small, half-laugh._

_"You're barmy," Harry mumbles. He turns his head back to him and drags himself nearer, closing his lips over Draco's lower lip, which is actually his upper lip right now, in a soft kiss._

_Draco kisses him again, chaste and sweet, and then lets him go. He smirks, a mellow uplift of one corner of his lips, looking at him fond and tender. He lifts a hand, brushes it over his mess of a hair upward, fingertips running down his jaw and cheek._

_"You are, and always will be, my beautiful boy," Draco murmurs to him, Harry's lips brushing against the movement of his own._

**…**   
  
  


The morning after his odd and inadvertent encounter with Draco, he'd woken up alone and remembered, in a fit of mortification, that he'd fallen asleep right beside him on the Quidditch Pitch. For two days after, Harry adamantly doesn't open the Marauder's Map to look for Draco again. Now he does need to open the map for other things, such as to search for Ron and Hermione, or to see what Ginny's up to, so sometimes his eye inevitably slips and catches sight of the _Draco Malfoy_ dot.

The point is, Harry doesn't _actively_ go looking for him, though when Draco is in the same room or place as him, he can't help but feel vividly aware of him, of his presence in their shared classes or when he's there at the same time as him in the library or when they're all gathered on the Hogwarts grounds and he's there, sitting either alone with a book in hand or learning wandless magic with Luna, or simply held in a conversation with her.

One morning, Draco doesn't show up to the Great Hall.

Breakfast goes on as usual, except that Harry feels strange and uneasy at the sight of the empty seat across the room. Somehow, in a bout of distraction, he doesn't notice a floating drop of love potion making its way to the cauldron cake in his hand. Neville points it out first, Seamus following up with a bemused clarification, both their gazes fixated and trailing as it nears Harry.

Hermione stands to her feet, her face thunderous with fury. She absorbs it quickly on a napkin and then slams her hands down on the table, rattling dishes and plates and spooking everybody at the Gryffindor table. Ginny shouts at the Great Hall to shut up, so that Hermione can rip into the anonymous perpetrator in the utter silence that has taken place.

Harry sincerely appreciates her efforts, but he has already decided, from then on, to just take all his meals straight from the kitchens.

He doesn't _really_ plan on going back to his dorms at lunch to take out the Marauder's Map. He doesn't really plan on requesting the kitchen house-elves for some extra food. He doesn't really plan on finding Draco at the edge of the lake after.

But that is where he ends up anyway.

"I have fruits," Harry says, lamely. He reaches into his basket and takes out an apple, holding it out to him. Draco cocks an eyebrow, lofty and cold. "It won't bite you now, will it, Malfoy? It's more likely to be the other way around."

Draco's face slips, then, just slightly, a peculiar expression flashing across his face, before it's quickly schooled away into an unimpressed look. Harry awkwardly withdraws his hand. 

"How did you find me?" Draco asks.

Harry briefly considers telling him he wasn't looking for him. And well, technically, he _wasn't_. He'd only wanted to not be at the Great Hall. But he thinks saying this will make Draco less likely to believe him anyway.

Harry huffs a smile. "Ah, I don't know. Maybe I just have a Malfoy-radar."

Draco stares at him, his mouth curled. "I beg your pardon?"

His smile wavers. "It's a… it's like a, you know…" He struggles to find words for a moment, and then gives up, shaking his head quickly. "Never mind. It's a muggle science thing." He decides to say something that would possibly interest Draco. "I have a magical map that shows me where everyone in Hogwarts is."

Draco doesn't seem sure if that isn't another attempt at humour. "Do you really?"

Harry tries to look as serious as possible. "Yeah."

Draco looks mildly intrigued. His mind seems to be turning, his eyes twitching to narrow for a split-second. He seems to have realized something. Harry suddenly regrets his decision when he considers that he might be thinking of Sixth Year. "And out of all the things you could do with it, you're using it to stalk after me of all people?"

"I look for other people! Ginny—" There is a brief flash of something, a flicker of a curl at Draco's mouth. Harry feels the unease slither in under his skin, a memory breathing between them a bit louder. He glances away, down at his sandwich, throat convulsing around the pulse of his erratic heart, and tries to compose himself. "I, er... I search for Ron and Hermione on it if I want to find them, but sometimes I sort of wish I hadn't, because a lot of the times they're alone together in an abandoned classroom or a closet and it brings thoughts I'd much rather not—"

"Whatever, Potter," Draco interrupts. Harry looks up at him, and finds a conflicted expression, as if he's warring with himself over something. "I want to see the map."

"Hm." Harry's lips quirk into a small smile, and he leans in slightly. "That's only for friends, Malfoy."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **References**  
> 
> 
> A dream memory from the second chapter in the train:  
>  _...Harry is looking at him expectantly though, a sort of stubbornness that makes Draco feel as if he’d sit there and hold out the bloody pasty forever if he had to._
> 
>   
> 
> 
> _Draco takes it hesitantly._
> 
>   
> 
> 
> _“It won’t very well bite you now, will it? Quite the way other around,” Harry teases playfully._
> 
> (Chapter Two)


	5. Chapter 5

Like a tidal wave, Potter comes crashing back into his life once more.

And eventually taken up by the tumultuous waves of his own foolish feelings, Draco finds himself growing completely lost to the deep, blinding pull within himself, something that shuts his eyes and mind to imprudence and rationality after a particular point.

It's a certain thing that Potter says, something painfully familiar and echoing of his dreams. It's a certain thing he does, or a certain way that he looks at Draco and smiles at him. Even if they don't hold the same meaning, it's all the ways that he's never done before.

Draco's spent years watching him with others, observing his goodliness towards people that weren't him. He's spent years seeing that for all the Gryffindor-ness of him, all the stupid and angry and reckless, there is something impossibly, charmingly gentle about his boyish veneer. And to have Potter be that way with him, not unlike he would a friend—

Even if Draco no longer wants to be his friend.

Not so anymore, at least. He isn't eleven, angrily weeping under the covers of his bed at night over a rejected handshake. He isn't twelve, watching Potter laugh with his friends across the Great Hall, trying to think him vexing and only ending up aching. He isn't thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, carrying a black cloud over his heart for ruining it all and just wanting to mean _something_ to him (but he'd meant everything to him somewhere now).

But perhaps he's always been a bit hopelessly dim in matters concerning Harry Potter. And perhaps he's always been the sort of person to take scraps over nothing. Just as he had with his father. Just as he had with Potter a long time ago, begging him in his mind to _just look at me, for Merlin's sake_ in the silence behind every call for his name across rooms.

This venture, of accepting Potter back into his life, hadn't started off all too well.

Draco had woken up bitter and aching, filled with an unspeakable fear and anger thrawn in his chest, an ugly and raw thing. It had followed him all through the morning, and seeing Potter in that moment had felt like the last thing he could bear.

He'd let his mouth run with the course of his emotions and had ended up snapping, said an unkind thing— _did_ _nobody ever teach you that it's pathetic to chase after one's company when they don't want you around, Potter?_ And _just fuck off, for Salazar's sake_ — 

It was only about a second after that he began to feel graceless and uncouth for his behaviour, seeing the look on Potter's face. There is an entire history of him acting graceless and uncouth with Potter, but in all that history, Potter had only ever snapped back, had only ever gotten fired up and wild.

Even at St. Mungos, Potter had only gotten annoyed and frustrated with his crude demeanor. He had scoffed and rolled his eyes and taunted him back if he'd ever lost patience, and when he'd used up the last meagre amounts of it, he had lashed out and left him in his hospital bed to stew alone.

Draco was not prepared for the way he'd felt seeing him go quiet instead. For the strange twist of his own heart at seeing him stand up to his feet, gather his things, and then slip away.

For a moment, in the midst of the malaise sinking down on the hollows of his chest, sticking heavily onto his insides, he'd wondered how he had come to this, and why Potter couldn't have just gotten fired up and wild this time as well.

And there he learns of another one of these newfound weaknesses of his; that no matter how much he argued with himself over it in his already restless nights, he could only momentarily evade the feeling of being an absolute wanker for hurting a boy he's indebted to more than he can repay in a lifetime. A boy he'd dreamed of loving forever.

Potter doesn't come back the next day, or the day after. Whenever Draco sees him around, he's avoiding his gaze, focusing too much on his tasks, Weasley and Granger shooting him bemused and worried glances every now and then and attempting at humour to cheer him up.

Surely a word of apology to Potter would have sufficed, or a note, even. 

But Draco, the pathetic fool that he is, ends up at Potter's door with breakfast one morning, when everybody had emptied out of the commons to head for the Great Hall. He'd known Potter would be staying behind because of the infamous Love Potion incident that's left him averse to eating around other people.

For a moment after the door opens, they only stare at each other, Potter's face unreadable as he leans himself against the doorframe. Draco shuffles uneasily in front of him.

"The way I'd behaved was—it was tactless and untoward. I believe an apology is in order." Potter's eying him in some unfathomable way. Draco clears his throat, painfully stiff and uncomfortable. He wonders vaguely if he ought to apologise for _all_ his tactless and untoward behaviours in the past here as well, but that felt like dredging up more than he should at the moment.

Potter chews at the upper corner of his lip for a moment. He shifts slightly against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. "I should apologize for imposing, then."

Draco nods. "Good. Well. That's done, then." He holds his arms out, hands around the bottom of the basket full of food items, most of them being Potter's usuals. 

He doesn't plan to stay, but after Potter takes his token from him, he moves aside, silently inviting him inside the dorm to share breakfast. Draco halts, mouth opening for words of refusal. But Potter is looking at him in a way that looks as if he's trying not to look too hopeful, lips bitten back, and Draco is a fool too in love to deny him, so he enters inside the dorm, his steps hesitant and slow.

They sit on his bed as they eat together, one of Potter's legs hanging off the side, the other curled on the mattress. His tie is as askew as ever. The hem of his trousers are riding up, putting his mismatched socks on display. Second Year, Draco had noticed them. He'd made a snide comment, something about Potter being blind as well as colourblind. It leaves a tug of quiet endearment in his cheek now.

It's all silent until Potter smiles slightly. Draco eyes him until Potter notices and looks up at him. In response to the inquiring raise of his eyebrow, he says, "nothing, it's just—" He fumbles for a moment. "you'd never have—you know. You'd never have done all of this before."

He doesn't point out that Potter would never have looked at him like a kicked crup before either. And that he hadn't already dreamed of a life then where all he'd ever seen was him happy, him with Draco.

At the end of this, as they begin to walk towards their respective classes, Potter asks, mildly tentative, pulling the strap of his satchel higher on his shoulder. "See you at the Great Lake for lunch?"

Draco hesitates, and it's clear. He wants to say, _d_ _on't ever come back, Potter._

He can't say _,_ _you_ _know_ and _you'll never want me_ and _it hurts to look at you sometimes._

_It hurts to not._

"Or not," Potter says. He gives him a flicker of a smile, holds it, rueful and small and tight. He looks impossibly young, his face sweet with boyishness and free of a life full of laughter.

There isn't an explanation for what it is that comes over him, the painful and irrational need, the want, the tenderness to the point of raw—the way he feels all the joy and good and comfort of his life in a moment, all of his dreams now fitted inside of one ridiculous boy with unruly hair and mismatched socks. 

And Merlin help him, just as Potter begins to turn around, Draco says, "Fine." 

He can't say what it is more, that he forces it out or that it is forced out of him.

Potter pauses, looking at him. The surprise seeps slowly into his face first, and then pleasantly so a moment later.

"Fine," Potter repeats with a nod, a beautiful smile. It's only a quiet word.

There are many points in time at which Draco tries to question the reason behind Potter wanting his company, despite him knowing what he knew, despite the memory that breathed heavy and unacknowledged between them. But he quickly abandons any such trains of thought when he learns that all it does is take him down a path to a terrible, delusional hope or a terrible hurt and humiliation. Some things are best not to think about if one requires their sanity, and Draco already has the recurrent sense that he's just about on the edge of losing it most of the time.

And so the more Draco begins to fall to this blinding foolishness of his, the more he watches himself grow more open to Potter's company, as if he were watching somebody else from afar, and the more Potter keeps coming back. He finds Draco at breakfast, where he shows up half-asleep before his tea and nearly drops into Draco's shoulder every few seconds. And then he shows up at lunch, and then dinner after Quidditch practices, after which they walk back to the dorm together and separate as he joins his Weasleys and Granger.

Draco doesn't want to be his friend. He wants to kiss him. But he's spent years pretending he didn't want to, and perhaps he can pretend a little while longer, until for as long as this lasts, until they go their separate ways for the rest of their lives, seeing as he will not be remaining anywhere near this country once he's free to leave it. Potter is one persistent bastard, but his persistence had to have a limit. He would hardly follow him outside of Britain.

In certain moments of clarity, Draco thinks, often, that he should leave. That he should withdraw. That he should remember that nothing good will come out of this pitiful venture when it ends. But he always ends up letting Potter come back another day, always ends up staying just a little while longer to watch a bright and beautiful dream play out in Potter's eyes and smile, because it's the most awake that he's felt since he's woken up.

When Draco is with him, he can almost feel his dreams again, and some part of him is well aware that it is this that keeps him going back. 

But at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, it all creeps back in. All his love turned to grief, running through him with nowhere to go.

Every night, he ends up here, sitting stone-still on the foot of his bed, his gaze losing focus on the wood line patterns of the floortiles. His mind is becoming hazy again, full of fragmented memories and dreams of a boy and a man in another faux life that was more real than anything here. 

For a long time, he sits there in all his love turned to grief, running through him with nowhere to go---until it pulls him to his feet, in some desperate need of catharsis. Until it strides him forward and drops him down on the chair in front of the desk. 

He tugs a parchment close to himself, the ink bottle with the quill dipped in it. He picks it up, wiping excess ink on the edges. His fingers hover over the top of the parchment.

He places the tip of the quill against it and writes.

_Dear Harry._

  
  
  
  


**...**

  
  
  
  


"Explain to me why we still address each other by surnames?" Harry says, lifting his head from his Transfiguration book to look at him. "You _can_ call me Harry, you know."

They've settled in an alcove somewhere on the third floor, which Draco had chosen by looking through the Marauder's Map. Harry had found himself oddly fixated by the fascination alighting his gaze as he followed the paths, Harry following him.

Draco's shoulder tense up, a long silence stretching out between them. His gaze is cryptic and rooted passively to nothing. "What?"

"I don't think so, Potter."

"Why not?"

Draco meets his gaze, holding it for a moment. There's a twitch of something in his face and in his fingers, restless and agitated. "It's much too strange."

"Not as strange as us still addressing each other by surnames."

"Are you really so desperate to be on a first name basis with me?" Draco asks. He has a half-amused smirk on his lips. Harry wouldn't call himself desperate, per se— "What was it you'd said in First Year when I asked for your friendship?"

"I stand by my eleven year old self," Harry says, stubbornly. "You were an arse to Ron."

Draco hums and shrugs, turning back to his book. 

"Why can't you call me Harry?"

Draco sighs low and long without looking at him, like he finds this all very tedious. "Because I just don't want to."

Harry shakes his head. The amount of protest for something so simple is ridiculous to him. " _Why_ are we even arguing about this? It's just a name. I don't understand the big deal."

"Neither do I," Draco retorts.

Harry huffs, looking ahead at the portrait on the wall across from them—a bizarrely dressed man standing in front of the mirror, fixing up his hair and making kissy noises at himself. "Well, can _I_ at least call you Draco?"

There's a pause, a long one, and then a quiet, "If it really means that much to you, Potter, then have at it."

When Harry glances at him, he catches the fading of an expression, a quick turn of the head.

There are times when it hits him, out of nowhere, the sudden weight of the realization that Draco has been in love with him for years, even if Harry would never have known this if their time at St. Mungos hadn't ended the way it did. There are times when he feels that phantom of a kiss again, the way it leaves his lips and his chest feeling strange, leaves a fluttery and fast and erratic pulse that beats down into his gut, leaves his skin hot and uncomfortable.

Draco has been staring intently at his book for the last moment. He steals a quick glance with a slight movement of his head, and then cuts fully back to him upon seeing whatever look he had on his face. Annoyance seeps into his lips, tightening into a scowl. "What?"

Harry realizes he's been staring at him, his gaze coming to rest on his lips for a split-second, before they dart away. 

It's normal, Harry thinks, to feel flustered and discomfited about something like this, especially if he's not into boys, especially if the boy is Draco. He averts his head further away, looking down at the cracked concrete floor. He gathers his things, feeling Drado's sharp gaze bore into him. "Nothing, I just…" He stands up quickly, dusts his knees. "I just remembered I had something, so I have to go before the classes start." He spins on his feet, and then pauses. He turns back around, clearing his throat. "I'll see you at lunch. Draco."

  
  


**…**

  
  


* * *

_\---I want to, you know. I want to call you by your name. But you've only ever been Harry where you were mine and I just can't—_

* * *

  
  


**...**

  
  


Some days, Draco spends most of his time with Luna, and Longbottom as well whenever he joins her. It's stiff and odd at first, being in Longbottom's company, but eventually the tension does ease up into a casual sort of acquaintance, the two of them linked together by a mutual friend. They drink together at pubs occasionally, walk through the village and converse, or mostly listen on Draco's part to Luna and Longbottom's discussions regarding some rather peculiar topics. Coming back to the dorm is still in silence after this, but not always. 

Other times, it's only him and Luna together, having a stroll on the grounds of Hogwarts or edging around the skirts of the forests, where she teaches him wandless magic or where they sit together near a lake or a pond and create ripples in the water. Some days he spends a fair amount of time searching for her things with her, which she claims have run off to explore the world and _I'm sure they'll return soon, there's really no need to worry, Draco_. Other times she suspects something called Snorkacks.

And then there are the days when Luna is joined by Ginevra Weasley, due to which Draco is forced to make up one excuse or the other. Usually he doesn't bother beyond a half-hearted, _I have things to do. Sorry, Luna._ She doesn't appear to mind it much when he does this.

"You seem fond of her," Draco says to Luna one day, swirling the golden glitter of magic distractedly with his finger. "Ginevra Weasley."

He wonders what she's like, sometimes, what it is that Potter sees in her. From all that he's heard of her, she's expressive, confident and bold.

Exactly the sort of girl he's always imagined Potter would like. 

"Oh, she's very lovely," Luna tells him, beaming with fondness. "And very kind as well."

The golden glitter around his finger wavers and dissipates. He lowers his hand. Fitting, he supposes, that Potter should only fall for someone as good as himself.

"But you don't like her very much, do you?" Luna says, her eyebrow raising. "I've noticed you always leave whenever she joins us." 

The first time she saw Draco with Luna, she'd eyed him bemusedly and asked, _what's he doing here?_ Luna had said, _he's my friend_ with a soft, much too pleased smile. She hadn't seemed any more open to the idea of him being there than Draco was to the idea of her hanging around for hours on end, so he'd said his departing words to Luna and taken his leave, spending the rest of the day walking around Hogsmeade on his own.

He wonders if she knows. If Potter's told her anything. It's a sickening thought.

"I don't know her."

He lifts his hand again, tries to focus on bringing his magic back to the forefront and into his fingers. It takes too long for the little glowing lines to form, but eventually they come, swirling around his hands. He draws them into a constellation, a dragon's head, a secret all for himself. Luna smiles and draws a half-crescent moon among them, white among gold.

_See that? That's you up there._

  
  
  


**...**

  
  
  


Prior to the start of their classes, Potter was telling Draco about the history of the infamous Marauders, ending on a note about his father and friends being unregistered animagi. The conversation promptly devolved into what animagi they themselves would be.

"Bet yours would be a ferret," Potter said, grinning.

Draco had not been amused, to say the least, and it showed. 

"Ah. Low blow?" Potter then asked, slightly chagrined. He then tried to compensate by asking Draco what he thought _he_ would be, thereby opening himself up for insult. But the bell rang right after, signalling the start of classes, so they'd made a quick break-off for their respective classrooms.

Draco's response came on their shared Charms class in the form of an animated doodle of an otter, all whiskers and snout and tail, with round glasses and a lightning scar at its head. He writes under it, _Harry Otter_ , folds it into a crane as he listens to the lecture—the theoretical aspects of the Gouging spell—and then sends it flying three seats up and on his left to Potter.

Potter pries open the crane with his fingers, tossing a glance over his shoulder as he does, before turning back to look at it. His grin comes slow a moment later, his hand brushing up to his nose and lips to repress it. 

He receives the note back some moments later, when he's long stopped anticipating any response. _I can't make anything else of your weird name, so here have a ferret. Ferretface Malfoy_ , _that's all I can come up with._ There's a sketch of a ferret, a ghastly one, but it's upturned whiskery-nose and flat mouth is somewhat evident, and so is its slicked back hair, looking like a wig plopped on top of its head.

He spends the next few minutes idly drawing a rabbit, the same thing all over again with the lightning scar and the round glasses, but now with a messy mop of black-shaded hair and a carrot for a wand. He writes _Hare Potter_ , and then puts an arrow between the two words that leads up to _-brained._

Potter rolls his eyes at this one, ducks his head. There's a small glimpse of his grin from the visible silver of his dimpled cheek, and he then sends the note back with a _Ha Ha._

 _Hairy Potter_ , Draco sends next, this time a monkey. _I see no difference_. And then Harry Potamus. Which, admittedly, is the worst of them all, but Potter laughs all the same, the soft and sweet sound buried under the rest of the noise.

Draco's mind keeps running through Potter's grin and laughter, dwelling in the sweet, aching warmth filling into the hollows of his chest.

  
  
**...**

* * *

_—Merlin, Harry, all I ever wanted to do was make you laugh—_

* * *

**...**

When they were young, Draco would fold his notes into origami and send them flying in classes to see Harry smile at them. Stupid, silly things, ridiculous drawings, sarcastic quips and comments about certain classes, mainly History of Magic and Divination, that he'd think Harry would find funny. 

Outside of class, he would sneak them into Harry's robes, or in between the pages of his Quidditch magazines to remind him of his homework or tests (a sketch of Harry running after a large circle labeled _your future_ , growing smaller and smaller. _GO STUDY_ ) or to wish him luck for the game ( _good luck, but don't keep your hopes up)_. He'd slip them between his textbooks ( _take a break if you're tired. I like you more when you aren't braindead_ and _I love you_ and _I know I call you an idiot all the time, but we both know it's actually the opposite. No, I know what you're thinking, and it's not that I'm the idiot, you idiot. It's that you're not an idiot.)_

In their later years, he would place them on kitchen counters by coffee or tea under stasis (a drawing of zombie-like Harry becoming happy Harry, _so that you may become a functioning member of society. Love, Draco_ ) or by fruits freshly bought from the market, by his favourite Honeyduke sweets and butter biscuits ( _just because I love you. Save some for me_ ). He'd drop reminders on winter mornings to not forget his cloak and hat and scarf in his hurry, _I have one love and I'd prefer he didn't freeze to death_.

Harry kept them all shrunken in a box under the bed until they exploded back into their full sizes one day, crowding their room. Draco had to consistently badger him to throw them away.

  
  
  


**...**

  
  
  


Ron picks up his books, shoving them into his bags. Hermione's eye twitches at his brutal treatment of them. "You haven't sat with us at meals for ages, Harry, so you're not disappearing wherever you go off to without us this time!"

Hermione's brows are knitted with concern. "Oh, Harry, you haven't been feeling left out around us, have you?" 

"What? No." Harry quickly shakes his head. After they've gathered all their things, they begin walking out of the DADA classroom. "No, it's fine. You two are, you know, a thing, and when you're a thing, it's… it's natural, right? To want to spend time together on your own?" 

He thinks vaguely of Ginny, and how unnaturally little time they spend together now. There's so much going on in their lives, he supposes. He tries asking her to come out with him somewhere, but she always has plans, and sometimes she asks _him_ , and he always has plans. They meet at Quidditch practice, mostly, and sometimes at night, but then they're both so knackered that they don't really do more than kiss.

"It's alright if you're upset," Hermione tries to tell him, touching his arm. "I'd totally understand."

Ron and Hermione do their best to not let him feel that way, like they're trying hard to keep things as they used to be _and_ be in a relationship together at the same time. But surely it's a bit natural to feel a little out of place, sticking around with a couple. They bicker like an old married one, too, which admittedly is nothing new, but it can be head-ache inducing if it seems to be tenfold more intense after them getting together. 

Either that, or they give each other the googly eyes, and sometimes, if given the opportunity, they disappear off to snog and do other stuff that Harry's not interested in thinking about.

So, maybe, Harry does feel a little out of place, and sort of thinks he'd be happier if he could spend more time with Draco. But it's just sort of their pattern now, for Harry to show up only around meal times, sometimes to study together after, and then separate. He wants to break it.

Ron and Hermione still don't know about his escapades with Draco, and he isn't sure how they'd feel about it either.

"No, I just don't want to be in the Great Hall after what had happened the last time."

"Yeah, I get it," Ron says, grimacing with a wince. They take a left turn out of the classroom and to the corridor, grabbing Hermione's hand. 

"Yeah," Harry says. "And besides, the food's way better when it's fresh out of the kitchens. So I don't mind."

"Alright. Then we'll come with you," Ron shrugs. "I mean. I like the variety more, but I wouldn't mind trying it your way either. Any food is good."

But Harry has already told Draco to meet him at an alcove on the third floor. "Ah. No. It's fine. You two should go on to the Great Hall, get some proper food. It's just the meals, right? I spend the rest of my time with you lot anyway."

"We don't want you to eat alone," Hermione insists.

 _But I haven't been eating alone,_ except Harry's heart has unexplainably started to kick up a storm at the thought of saying this at all.

"You haven't been alone, have you?" Hermione asks, then, with a squint as she halts and all of them with her; apparently reading his silence.

Harry shifts nervously. "Ah, well."

"I have two conclusions, but I know it can't be one of them because you wouldn't be hiding a secret girl while you're with my sister." Ron eyes him closely. "So it's Malfoy, isn't it? That's who you've been hanging around during meals?"

"It makes sense. Neither of you are ever at the Great Hall," Hermione points out.

"Yeah. And don't think we didn't notice you and your weird… whatever… with him. You were laughing over his stupid doodles in class the other day."

"Do you guys still hate him?"

There's a stretch of silence. Hermione chews on her lip.

"Not anymore, I think," she finally says, her words slow. "It's—hard to hate him after—you know." She has a pitying expression on her face. "And he did apologize to me. It doesn't undo what he did, but at least it means he's changed to some extent."

Ron rubs the back of his neck, uncomfortably. "Yeah, I suppose. What she said." He clears his throat. "So what? Do you like him now or something? Isn't he still sort of a twat?"

"We're on fairly good terms." Harry grins. "I'd even say we're friends now."

Although Draco still refused to call him anything other than Potter for whatever reason.

"Well," Hermione says, smiling as she locks an arm with him, and they all begin walking down the corridor again. "As long as you always remember who your _best friends_ really are."

Harry smiles at her. He then looks to Ron. He seems to be trying to absorb this, staring ahead with a furrow of his brows. 

"Ah. Ron?" Harry waves a hand in front of his face.

Ron blinks. "Oh. Er. Sorry, just...never thought I'd see this day. You and Malfoy being chummy." He heaves a slow, long sigh, mumbles under his breath, "Still better than you hiding a secret girl while you're dating my sister, I guess."

Harry's chest loosens, and he laughs. He stops walking, then, already wanting to be at the alcove looking at Draco's name and footsteps. "Alright. So, see you guys at Quidditch practice after, then?"

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


"Never asked you why you quit Quidditch."

Draco rolls his eyes. "Don't talk with your mouth full."

"Oh, so sorry," Harry continues with his mouth full. He grins at Draco's unimpressed expression. "Tell me why you quit."

"It no longer appeals to me." It makes Harry downhearted, hearing that. They'd been good competitors against each other. "On top of that, I do need as much time as possible to focus on my studies, now that any future I can have is heavily dependent on extraordinary grades and nothing else."

"You could manage." Harry looks at him, hopeful. "You're only second to Hermione, after all."

Draco shrugs, noncomitally, but he looks pensive. Harry thinks it's because of how off-kilter his focus has been these days, like there's always something taking up all of it inside his head, and sometimes he thinks of asking, but it never feels like Draco would ever take it well—any reminder that Harry had been present during his most vulnerable state. 

"Shame," Harry says. "It could have been like old times. You and me."

"Would you really want it to be like the old times, Potter?"

Harry hums, and then grins. "You being a cheat and a sore loser every time I won against you in the Quidditch cup? No, I suppose not."

Draco cocks an eyebrow. "A cheat, was I? When it was you that often got suspiciously lucky?"

" _Suspiciously lucky_? It's called _talent_." Draco scoffs at that, mutters, _oh,_ _please._ "Well, I did also say a sore loser."

"Fuck off!" Draco shoves at his shoulder, nearly tipping him over into the Lake. Harry laughs, gripping hard at the edge and Draco's arm to keep his balance.

"Will you come to watch the game?" Harry asks. They'll be up against Slytherins today, which he hopes will be of some interest to Draco. He never shows up for any of the games anymore, and Harry wants to see him there.

(Strange, how much he does. How much he wants to see him all the time.)  
  


**...**

  
  
  


Draco is at the front in the stands when he comes to watch Potter.

Before the game starts, Potter's gaze roves over the crowd of audience on the sidelines. Seeing as his girlfriend is floating not a few feet away from him, he is not entirely sure who or what he's looking for until Potter's gaze lands on him and stops. He straightens a little further on his broom, throwing him a wave and a grin.

The ongoing commentary is background noise, the rest of the game a blur, for the way Draco can't stop looking at him. He flies beautifully, as he'd always had, with the wind whipping his hair wilder, colour in his cheeks and the sun swathing him as golden as itself, the determined focus of his gaze.

Draco had been jealous of it all once, watching him with something ugly and aching in his chest underneath something else entirely, something rawer. Now that he's more detached from the competition, he can see it in all its wonder.

Slytherin has forty points on Gryffindor as of now. The Golden Snitch hasn't yet been seen by either of the Seekers. In a time-out between the game, Potter pulls his broom to the right, swooping down and flying over towards Draco. He lowers down a little, coming to a floating still in front of him.

"Don't you wish you could be up here, playing against these Gryffindor wankers, Draco?" Potter's voice is loud, trying to be heard over the chatter and noise and winds.

Draco has both his arms atop one another, leaning on the railing. "I think Slytherin's beating you Gryffindor wankers just fine without me."

"Ah, but see." Potter inclines forward and down, hands wrapped around the broom, to lean his face close to his, a smile setting his face alight in the day. "The game isn't over just yet. Wish me good luck?"

"Seeing as you'll get lucky anyway? I think not."

The game starts again. Potter flies off to take his position a moment before, talks to Ginevra and kisses her cheek hard. Draco averts his gaze quickly.

The sickening fester in his chest is soothed only by the way that, every now and then, when Potter pulls a great stunt that has the crowds cheering and wild, his green eyes find Draco for a short moment, a broad smile on his face that puts his own swollen heart to his throat, slow and erratic, hiding just so behind an uplift at a corner of his mouth.

  
...

* * *

_—How can I ever forget you?—_

* * *

  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

After Quidditch practice, Ginny pulls Harry into an empty broomshed and tells him she can't be with him anymore.

"I still love you, I do," she says. She sounds distressed, sort of breathless with it. "but I'm — I'm _overwhelmed_ and I just can't _deal_ with a relationship right now, you know? I can't be what you need me to be right now."

"Gin," Harry says, shakes his head with an incredulous laugh. "Gin, I don't need you to be anything. I just need you to be — to be you, whoever that is right now. You don't have to be anything else."

Ginny smiles, in that way she sometimes did, endeared. "I know. But... It just feels like — " She trails off, swallows as she looks down. She looks tired, and Harry wonders why he's never paid more attention to that. "There's just so much going on, so much in here — " She gestures at her head. "It feels like I'm going to explode sometimes. And I have this — this constant feeling like I'm not there enough and it just — "

His chest hurts, looking at her, feeling the shame curl around his heart. He's known she's grieving, known she isn't talking about things, knew she didn't like to, but Harry never pushed. In part, it was because he understood the frustration of being pushed into talking about things before one was ready to, but mostly, he thinks he might have just let it pass because he didn't know what to do about it, how to help. How to say all the right words and be there. He still doesn't know how to feel anything of his own most of the time, only ever talked about things to a boy in a hospital bed that he'd thought wouldn't be listening.

"I'm sorry I didn't..." Harry says. He frowns, looking down at his hands. "I wasn't there enough either, was I?"

"Not really," Ginny says, in a small, somewhat quivering huff. "But you know me. I wouldn't have wanted you to push me."

Harry feels suffocated with himself. "I could have done a lot more, anyway. I'm sorry I didn't."

Ginny looks up at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed. "I didn't expect you to."

A silence comes over them, then, and there he is again, at a loss for words. Not knowing the right ones.

Ginny sighs. "I'm not good with this, you know. Dealing." She gives a mirthless half-laugh. "I remember after Second Year, everybody would just be looking at me all the time, trying to get me to talk. They'd be so worried. Everyone except — " She pauses, her eyes clouding slightly. She's looking away, her throat convulsing, and when she speaks, her voice breaks on his name, " _Fred_."

She laughs again, watery, pushing a hand through her sweat-damp hair. "He would... he'd always be trying so hard to make me laugh. And — and he _would_ , you know. Make me laugh. I think — I think he was the only one that I wanted around me then. George too, but even he sort of held back, and I didn't want anyone to hold back. I just wanted everything to keep going like it had before so I could just _forget_."

Harry nods. He nods and listens and swallows hard. He thinks of Sirius, and how, for a while after, he always felt like he might break because everyone kept looking at him like he would.

"I just loved him so much," Ginny whispers, presses the back of her fingers against her mouth to gather herself. "And it's so hard to forget anything now when he's..." Harry steps forward, his throat burning, wanting to hold her, but she shakes her head, stepping away. He stays where he is, arms falling back to his sides. When she finally regains composure, she swallows hard and straightens, looking him in the eye. "you loved him too."

Harry did. It was possible to ignore grief when it wasn't staring him right in the face. When he didn't see his loss in Ginny's eyes. Didn't see what it did to her. His eyes sting, his heart full with love and grief. "I did," he says, very quietly, finally feels something of his own. "I do."

Ginny nods. They share a small, wavering smile. "It's... I can't say it's easy or anything, talking to Aileen either. But it's still easier to talk about it with someone that's outside of it all, you know? Someone that didn't love him and know him. Even if I was any better at talking about things, I wouldn't have wanted to add to your plate either."

Harry moves closer, and Ginny doesn't move away this time. He kisses her cheek, drawing her close to his chest. They stay there for a long time.

"Maybe one day," Ginny says into his chest. "When we both — " she laughs. "When we both have our shite together."

"Yeah," Harry says into her hair. He swallows. "I love you."

"I love you too." She draws back from him, touches his cheek, lets it linger for a moment. Then she steps away, takes her broom off the wall. "Take care of yourself, yeah?"

  
  


...

  
  


Draco finds Harry quiet at the edge of the lake. 

There's a rustle of leaves in the wind, footsteps nearing Harry. Harry sees his black oxfords first, and looks up at him just as he reaches him, a hand in his trouser pocket. His eyes follow Draco's profile as he plops down beside him, pulls his legs up into a cross of the ankles, jostling his hand out of his pocket to lean back on it. The weight around Harry's heart holds his shoulders down, keeps his head down too. Harry glances away, at his hands clasped between his lap, mumbles a greeting that he isn't sure is even heard.

For a moment there's silence. A small snort. "What's this I see? A sad Potter?" 

Harry tries to shake his head, meet his eyes, but for some reason, finds that he can't, too quick to look away. "Just been a strange day."

Draco hums, sounds almost noncommittal about it. "And what are these… _strange_ things that have happened today?"

Harry keeps silent. It doesn't feel right talking about Ginny to him.

"Hm. Alright then." Draco gets up, then, dusts his trousers and robes, and then walks away. Harry doesn't know what to feel about it. The completely indifferent reaction. Part of him stings with it, a terrible ache growing over pain already stretching his chest taut. The more rational part of him tries to let go.

But Draco comes back a quarter of an hour later, takes his place beside him again, saying, "I don't know what _strange_ things have happened with you today, but..." He drops a bag between them. "I have been taught that sweets make everything better."

The words sound similar to somebody else's, Harry realizes, as he watches Draco pull out a chocolate frog for himself. It makes Harry smile, even as his chest tightens at the thought, but it's looser than it was a moment ago. _"_ I knew somebody who said something similar."

Draco looks at him, a hushed and unfathomable stare. Harry works his lower lip, turns his head away. A few seconds after, Draco digs around in the bag one-handed and throws him a box of treacle tarts.

"Mother always asks about you in our letters," Draco tells him, with a wry snort. " _How is Harry doing?_ " Harry straightens at the sound of his first name in Draco's voice. He's not sure he's ever heard Draco call him that. " _Is Harry well? Have you spoken to Harry recently?_ I really don't know how much longer I can take trying to tell her that you're fine just as you were yesterday, and the day before that, _and_ the day before that…"

Harry smiles slightly, chagrined. "Oh wow. I really should write to her then, shouldn't I?"

"Please do," Draco says. The chocolate frog ribbits in his grip, as he turns his card over to look at it. _Circe_. "And do tell her to stop harassing me with questions about your wellbeing."

Harry takes a second to imagine how _that_ will go, and blinks, laughing. "No way. I don't want to make an arse of myself to her."

Draco raises an eyebrow, looking at him from the corner of his eye. "Look, Potter, it's all in the wording. If you just word something right, you can tell somebody to fuck right off and still be polite."

"Is that so?" Harry raises an eyebrow, amused. "Alright then. Do it. Tell me to fuck off politely."

"Kindly fuck off." Harry rolls his eyes. Draco grins at him, a canine crooked at one corner of his mouth. "Obviously you better be a lot more tactful with my mother. Perhaps begin with a _dear Mrs. Malfoy._ " He sounds overly posh, and Harry represses a smile behind a bite of his treacle tart. He shakes his head and mouths, _Narcissa_. Draco's brows raise up, bemused, wrinkling his nose. "You're on a first name basis with her?"

"Yep."

Draco takes that in stride with a blank stare at nothing, and then a shake of his head. "Alright then. _Dear Narcissa. How are you? Wonderful, I hope. I would like to kindly request that you stop harassing your poor beloved son with constant questions of my wellbeing. He is not my keeper. Thank you._ There you go. I'm sure she'll listen to you."

Harry jerks the treacle tart away from his mouth in an exaggerated display of indignation. "Well, _that_ will just make me sound ridiculous!"

"Not too far off from what you are then," Draco says, breaking into a tremor of laughter half-way through when Harry shoves at him, laughing too. 

"I'm _this_ close to throwing you into the lake, you tosser. _This_ close."

In the silence that follows after, comfortable and easy, they watch the bright yellow glints in the water, eating sweets together. Harry's gaze keeps getting drawn to Draco, to the raise of his cheekbone, the sharp cant of his jaw, a small smile playing at his lips each time.

  
  


…

Breaking the pattern of only seeing each other at mealtimes means that he spends a lot of time with Draco now. With Ron and Hermione always paired together in projects, sitting together, Harry makes himself a place beside Draco in all the classes they share. They exchange their drawings and notes throughout drawn-out lectures, quietly smiling. There are times Harry even finds them tucked into his robes, into his books, left under his door.

They collect in his trunk now, the shrunken cranes filling up a corner. He's — they're — the _doodles_ are funny, if sometimes of a peculiar sense of humor, and creative, and interesting.

Now they show up on mornings at each other's door. Sometimes Ron's long gone out to the Great Hall with Hermione, and other times, he's there, stiffly pretending Draco isn't there and vice versa. Draco waits for Harry to get ready, berating him for his tardiness as he leans on his doorway with his arms crossed, watching Harry bustle around, clumsily tie his tie, grab his robes, put his socks and shoes on. On the days Harry isn't late, they walk together to the kitchens, carry their meals to the grounds of Hogwarts, to the ramparts of the castle, to hidden alcoves. On the days when Harry is late, Draco brings him breakfast instead, and he scarfs it all down on the way to class.

Now, he follows Draco into the library, has him help with his homework, even though he has zero patience when it comes to explaining anything Harry can't grasp instantly. In compensation, Harry gives him additional notes and tips on DADA, which Draco appreciates.

Other times, their days are spent at Hogsmeade, where Draco has taken a strong liking to visiting Honeydukes and buying a ton of sweets for the two of them, though Harry should have expected this, having known of his sweet tooth. Almost all of them are among Harry's favourites, which either means he likes too many sweets, or he and Draco like too many of the same ones.

Weekends are always spent at a pub with Ron and Hermione, but there are times they are joined by Draco, Luna and Neville as well if they ever end up there at the same time, and Harry likes those sort of weekends. Draco usually watches their interactions from a small distance, commenting or adding a quip every now and then to something being said, fiddled slightly with his drink and smirked at Harry's jokes. He doesn't talk a lot with Harry while everybody's around, doesn't talk a lot in general among others. 

Harry always tries to somehow end up next to him if there is ever free space, arms and shoulders pressed together subconsciously because of the tight squeeze. Throughout it all, Harry keeps finding himself glancing over at Draco, to see if he was amused by what Harry or somebody else said, to gauge his mood, to ask him something in a murmur between them, to point something funny out.

…

"Your father used to come and speak to me, did you know."

Luna was giving him further lessons on how to substitute wand movements with hand movements, but when Draco began to grow frustrated, she'd stopped him, made him sit down with her on the grassy embankment and take a break.

Upon understanding her words, Draco blinks, gaze quickly dropping to the ground in front of him. "Oh."

Luna hums. She is brushing her hands over the top of the nettles of grass. "There were times when he couldn't bring himself to use the Cruciatus Curse on me, no matter how much Bellatrix screamed at him." It still astounds him at times, how straightforward she can be, how she had a way with talking about such things so calmly. "I couldn't understand why for a long time until he told me that I reminded him of you. He'd then weeped and apologized to me."

Their resemblance was, indeed, uncanny, with her white-blonde hair, only a shade darker, and her eyes as silvery as his own. They could have been siblings. When Draco can't look at her anymore, he looks away.

"I'm sorry," he says. His voice comes out low, strained, and he feels like he can never be sorry enough for what had happened to her at the hands of his family. "For what Bellatrix and my father did to you."

Luna's head turns to him. She leans down to meet his eyes. "You're not the one who should be," she says, waiting for him to look at her again. 

Draco does, a flick of a glance. "I know." He clears his throat, clears his voice. "But still. It should not have happened."

She only smiles at him, a little rueful. Then she goes back to brushing her fingers through grass, as if grounding herself to it, letting it be quiet for a while.

"Your father seemed very sad whenever he spoke of you," she says, then. "as if something had happened to you."

There's a long silence, but somehow it doesn't feel so much like a closing of the conversation, but an opening of one, leaving him space to fill it. She looks at him again, but doesn't say anything further.

Draco's throat convulses. He tries not to _think,_ but his hands are beginning to tremble anyway, and he remembers a dim and grey cellar. He remembers Greyback and Rowle, hands on him, wands over him. He remembers things he doesn't know if he can ever speak of.

His mouth opens, words perched on his tongue, thinks of telling her many things _—_ _they took me and_ _they kept me in a filthy cellar for months_ _and_ _they hurt me and they—_

"They—" His voice dies instantly, cracked and hoarse and lacking air, as if someone has snatched it away from him. 

He cannot bring himself to say any of it, jaw working, chin quivering. His face contorts painfully, but the tears don't come beyond a sting in his eyes. He feels hollow and overwhelmed all at once, his breaths unsteady and growing higher and heavier into something louder, bordering on gasps. Panic and despair washes down on him, threatens to take him away somewhere else in his mind.

"May I have your hand, please?" Luna asks, is scooting close to see him, and Draco doesn't know what she understands, how much she does. He doesn't know how to feel about it, only that he wants to cry, but he can't and he doesn't. "I won't touch you."

He holds his shaking hand out for her, trying to get his breathing back under control. She lets her magic swirl around her hands, draws the white threads of light into wrapping around his hand, the other ends coming to curl around her own. The warmth spreads through his skin, seeps into his chest, something tranquilizing.

"There," she says, giving him a faint smile. "Now it's like I'm holding your hand."

Draco blinks, hard and fast. His fingers idly brush over the semi-solid threads as he observes them, and is strangely soothed by the connection, the gesture, as he tries to pull his mind back and into the present instead. It's a long time after, with Luna talking softly to him, trying to ground him, that he calms down enough for his heartbeats to steady, his breaths slowed to a more even pace.

When his hands begin to tremble again, Luna tugs, and it hurts just a little less.

  
  


...

  
  


"The war feels like a dream sometimes," Harry says. They're laid on their backs on the floor of the Astronomy Tower, where all the stars scattered rich and bright above them. The wireless plays on between their heads. "Like it never happened. And it's… strange, isn't it, how people have moved on so fast?"

"I imagine that's better than the alternative," Draco says, carefully, throwing him a quick glance, a raised eyebrow.

" _True_ ," Harry says, the word a slow, considering stretch. "But strange anyway."

There's a silence, and then, "I sometimes think I may have had it easier, back then. When I was dreaming."

Harry doesn't say anything to that. He doesn't know if anybody had anything easy that year, if he can think of those dreams as any better when he thinks of Draco nearly dying from them.

"Will you tell me about them? Your dreams?"

"There's nothing to tell of it."

"I'd like to know."

Draco remains transfixed above them. There's a huff, something that isn't quite disdain, something else entirely. "What do you want to know?"

"What was it like?"

There's a pause, a contemplative one. "Bright," Draco says simply. "Everything was brighter than you can imagine. Leaves this… reality... feeling like a dream itself most of the time."

That's an idea that Harry can't even wrap his head around. "Wow. That's..." he says. His throat convulses around his lack of words. Everything he can think of saying sounds underwhelming, so he gives up trying. "What—what did you see there?"

"I told you. Everything I ever wanted." 

Harry smiles at the echo of a conversation, a while ago. "What is _everything you ever wanted?_ "

Draco heaves a close-mouthed sigh, heavy, looking at him with a thin set of his lips. He keeps silent for a moment, and it seems to Harry that he won't tell him this time either.

But he does. He does tell him, even if he's concise and straightforward about it. He tells him about a picturesque life where nothing went wrong, where there was no Voldemort nor Death-Eaters. His mother, happy and untroubled, and his father a different man. Severus, not so different from who he was here, and him becoming a Potions Professor just as his godfather was.

In the quiet that follows after, Draco falls asleep, bathed in the dim blue lights of astronomy. The next time Harry looks over at him, his eyes have slipped shut. His chest is rising and falling to a slow, even pace, his breaths audible and steady. The sound of him being alive and here.

There is a terrible sort of dread swelling up in Harry's chest, overtaking him at the thought of Draco's mind lost in dreams that kept it safe, slowly killed his body on the outside, his eyes blank and unseeing, his body unmoving and sprawled on the floor of the Manor, of the cellar, on a hospital bed. At the thought of a world where Draco was never saved, like so many others that Harry held dear. A world where Harry came for him too late, and Draco wasn't right here next to him, where he never brought him sweets and sent him ridiculous drawings in class and fell asleep under a sky full of astronomy with him.

On the closest edge of slumber, Harry's mind swims with faint and afar thoughts of holding his hand, or holding his waist. Of touching him somewhere warm and real. His fingers reach across the space between them, the tips of them brushing over the soft skin of Draco's wrist. He feels the beat of his heart at its innerside, feels the life of him, reminding himself that he is still here.

  
  


…

  
  


At dawn, they are nearly found by Filch before Harry throws the Invisibility cloak over the two of them. After having narrowly escaped trouble, watching Filch eye around suspiciously before deflating and leaving, Harry pulls the cloak off of them.

"We really need to stop falling asleep like this," Harry declares. His back aches. His neck aches. Everything aches. He winces, grimacing as he rubs at the twinge in the back of his neck, sharing a look with Draco. " _Really_ need to stop."

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Draco's mouth twitches, and a second later, they're both laughing, Draco's grey eyes crinkling and bright, the folds of his cheeks dipping with it all.

He vividly notices Draco leaning his face towards his own, the sound of his laugh near Harry's jaw. Harry's head is lowered between his own shoulders, a broad grin pulling at his cheeks, and he can still feel the phantom of Draco's body against his side, from when they squeezed together under the cloak.

Harry thinks, just for a second, of turning his head and doing something he can't acknowledge the thought of.

* * *

  
  


_—I sometimes think you're all I live for. I lived one life living for you and now it's all I know—_

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


A day later, Harry shows up with two coins.

"We can talk to each other on this," Harry says. He hands Draco one of the Galleons. "It's charmed so that if we say each other's names, it turns on, and we'll be the only ones to hear each other."

"Huh." Draco huffs, impressed and fascinated. He lets it fall from his fingers into his palm, gripping it as he shakes it slightly to Harry. "And _you_ made this?" He sounds somewhat incredulous about it.

Harry partially wishes he did, then. "No. Hermione did. She made three of them, just as a sort of experiment. That one's Ron's, actually…" He clears his throat awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. He feels a bit guilty for stealing it, especially knowing that Ron often uses it to talk to Hermione at night, but he's sure she'll just think Ron lost it and make him another one. "I'd thought… instead of… what we do, we could just… talk from our own rooms? If we have trouble sleeping, I mean. Only if you want to, of course—"

"That'll work," Draco says. He's still eying the Galleon, turning it this way and that, a quirk of a smile at his lips. He looks up at Harry, still with that impressed smile, and Harry's heart inexplicably flips into his throat. "It's much better than risking being found by Filch, or bloody _Peeves_."

"Let's give it a try, then," Harry says. He whispers, _Draco._ Draco walks some distance away, holding the Galleon to his ear. "Can you hear me?"

Draco's eyes widens slightly. He draws it away and looks down at it. He murmurs _Potter_ into the Galleon and says, "Yes, I can hear you."

The first night with the coins, Harry is the one that calls Draco first. "Draco? Are you awake?"

"I'm awake," Draco responds.

"Yeah. Sorry. I just…I couldn't sleep…"

Draco makes a dismissive sort of noise, and then begins telling him about what he'd learned in his Muggle studies class today. He talks about it sometimes, and it's endearing, how fascinated he is by all the difference in culture, even though he tries to hide it.

"I got lost in a Muggle district once," he says, after he'd told Harry of the major religions in the muggle world, which Harry already knew of, but it's not so much the words as it is his voice that he wants to fall asleep to.

Harry snorts a small laugh. "Really?"

"Yes. I was five years of age. Terrified of those muggle metal contraptions. Oh, shut up Potter!" Harry tries to quell his laughter, barely managing to tell him to go on. "It was horrid to my child brain, I will have you know. I had assumed that the people inside had been eaten by these creatures. It was only when I grew up that I'd learned they were called _vehicles_. That is, a form of muggle transportation—"

The way he speaks with an alive sort of interest and mild awe… it sweetens him, and Harry finds himself wanting to see him so much that his heart hurts. But he doesn't ask to or get out of bed and go knocking at his door. He stays in bed and teeters on the edge of slumber, listening to his voice. He has a nice voice, Harry vaguely thinks. 

"They may be smarter than we know," Draco muses, with a huff. "That they achieve all of this without magic?"

Harry smiles. "Yeah." His voice comes soft and sleep-thick. 

"Some—" There is a hesitant pause, and then a sigh. "Some part of me still doesn't like saying these things."

"Then keep saying these things."

* * *

_—you are the only good thing in my life, and fuck it all, I'm going to keep you for as long as I can—_

* * *

  
  
  


"Luna?" 

"Hm?"

Draco hesitates. He turns his head, looks to Luna, who's sprawled on the grounds next to him. They've been 'cloud-watching', as Luna calls it, her telling him what each cloud in the sky seems like to her. Too often her observations are comically wild, but sometimes they're a creature that Draco has never heard of, and isn't even sure are real, so she has to describe their appearance.

"I'm gay," Draco says, very quietly, to her.

Luna smiles, in that way she often does, hazy and small. There's a strand of her hair, brushing her cheek, dancing in the wind coming in from behind her. "Okay," she says, just as quietly.

The ease at which she accepts this leaves him still, uncertain of how to take it. He's been thinking a lot about his father these days. He's been thinking about all the things he wouldn't like about Draco, some of those that have always been a part of him; what he's always felt for Harry Potter, the fact that he likes boys, that he has begun to renounce his father's bigoted and extremist beliefs. That some part of Draco loathes him until it makes him sick, when he looks at Luna, and the other part of him, a seven year old boy in a dream who'd learned to fly from his father, still cannot let go of what he's lost. What he's never felt like he had.

Madam Aileen said, on his visit to her a few days ago, that he was his own person, and he did not need to internalize what his father had taught him, what his father had thought of those like him. _It'll take time_ , she said, _but one day you'll understand that this is an integral part of you, that there is nothing wrong with who you are. No matter what the world may say._

"Do you—" Draco hesitates. "Do you think that's wrong?"

"No. Of course not." Luna shrugs. "I don't think you can ever be wrong in being who you are, unless you're hurting someone. Are you?"

 _Possibly my dead father rolling about in his grave._ "No, I suppose not. But most people are bothered by it, aren't they?"

"Well. That's not really your problem to solve."

Draco eyes her for a moment, wondering what he did to deserve a friend like this. A smile quirks at one corner of his mouth, dwelling in the way his chest has loosened, how it feels just a bit lighter and calmer from carrying this secret around, somehow. He looks up at the sky, the clouds floating slowly above them. His magic swirls around his hand, curls the threads around hers, passing warmth and light between them.

  
  


**...**

  
  


Harry tugs at his tie, keeps trying to adjust it into trying to make it look more presentable in front of the mirror. Draco's leaning on the doorway, waiting.

It's embarrassingly well-known that Harry never learned how to do this, fairly obvious from the way his tie always looks unkempt and off. The Dursleys never exactly bothered to take the time to teach him such basic things, which is fine, whatever, because he's managed to teach himself a lot of things that they never did regardless. But tying a tie—well, that's been one of the few exceptions.

The first time anyone tried to teach him was Ron who, bless him, spent many patient mornings in First Year trying to explain it to him, doing it for him to show him all the steps. For whatever reason, Harry's brain never quite managed to catch on to most of it. Ron left it alone only when he managed to succeed in making it into a somewhat passable imitation.

"Ah, come on," Harry mutters, annoyed. He tugs at it, trying to unknot it completely and begin again. He can feel Draco's gaze burning on him. A flush of mortification runs up his cheeks. His desperate hurrying was only making him tardier, and suddenly it seems a lot more embarrassing that he doesn't know how to do something so simple than it has ever been.

There are footsteps, then, nearing towards him. Harry lifts his head just as Draco's nimble hands reach for his tie, draws Harry to face him with a small tug on it, unknotting it completely.

"I…" Harry clears his throat, not sure what to say that won't provoke a rebuke. His face feels hot from mortification. 

Draco is standing so close to him, the tips of their shoes inches apart. His movements were precise, practiced. Harry can't find it in himself to stop him, stilled by the way his heart's fluttering into his gut, by how close Draco's face is to his, slightly bowed as his hands work. It feels very different from when Ron does it for him.

"What?" Draco asks, without looking up at Harry.

"Nothing. I just—" He clears his throat. "I can do it myself. Even if it's not—I mean, it's not like anyone cares."

"Well, I do, Potter." Draco's lips are pressed tight, little pin-dots on the corners of his mouth, and Harry is distracted by them in the clearest way right now. " _I_ have to look at it every day, and it is painful to my eyes."

Draco pushes the knot at Harry's collar with a thumb and finger, tightening and shaking it a little to make it tighter still. Harry grimaces as it presses into his throat, touching the knot of the tie and muttering, "that's... _really_ tight." He feels mildly suffocated.

"It's really not, you disastrous wanker. You're only too used to your incompetent ways." Draco lets him go, patting his chest as he turns around, waving him along with a hand over his shoulder. The warmth of it lingers on Harry's chest. "Come along now, before we become any later."

  
  
  


**…**

  
  
  


_"At this point, I firmly believe you only pretend not to know," Draco says. He tugs at the two flaps of the tie to pull Harry closer by the nape of the neck. Harry grins, stepping forward easily, and then quickly wipes it off his face. He feigns bemusement, blinking as he recoils his head._

_"I would never." Harry curls an arm around him fully to pull him tight against him, tries to kiss his cheek. Draco swats at him to loosen the grip, so that he can have enough space between them to keep working at his tie. "I keep telling you, I try to memorize it when you do it, but the moment I try to do it myself, it slips right by me like water."_

_"Disastrous wanker," Draco mutters. There's a tug of a smile at his lips anyway, fond and exasperated in equal measures. He tightens the knot to his collar, pats Harry's chest and kisses his mouth. "Come on now, before we become late."_

  
  


**…**

  
  
  
  


Over the course of several days, Draco seems particularly withdrawn, his mouth small and serious. He smirks less, laughs even lesser, and looks tired all the time, scarlet circles sinking his eyes in.

"Will you tell me what's been on your mind?"

"No."

"Draco."

"Just talk."

Harry sighs, caving, and he does, telling him about everything and nothing. But his worry nags at him all throughout, the urge to go to him constantly breathing down his neck.

So Harry gets off his bed as soundlessly as he can, gets out of his room. The coin in his hand speaks at the stretch of his silence, cracking, " _Potter, are you there?_ "

"I'm here," Harry whispers into it. "Come outside. I'm standing at your door."

A minute later, the door opens, slowly, Draco standing there in the doorway, his face bemused. He looks impossibly young in his pyjamas, his eyes red-rimmed, his nose tinged pink.

Harry doesn't think much beyond how much he wants to hold him, an urge so strong it propels him forward into Draco's space, to step up to him and wrap his arms around his shoulders, raised slightly on his bare toes.

Draco tenses up instantly against him, arms still at his sides, and Harry remembers Smith, and Theo at his bedside touching his shoulder, how Draco moved away from it even in his stillness, his gaze sunken and flat and fixated ahead. How Draco moves away from everybody's hands these days.

Harry is about to let go of him, his brain only then verging on a horrible doubt, on stepping back quickly. But then Draco's palm flattens at the middle of his spine, a very light and almost tentative touch, and he doesn't move away from Harry.

Harry pulls him closer instead, just so, burying his nose into his shoulder, inexplicably struck with the memory of him at seventeen in his home, small and hurt in his father's arms and telling a room full of people that hurt him that he did not know if Harry was Harry or not.

They stand there just like that, in the doorway, in the dimness of the moonlight, barely reaching them through a window across Draco's dorm. In the quiet of the sleeping all around them.

Harry's heart is racing, full in his throat. He can smell the shampoo in his hair from here, floral and sweet. He lets go of Draco first, a bit quickly, but he grabs his wrist immediately after and drags him off towards the exit, Draco stumbling, following after him. "Let's go for a fly," Harry says. The warmth of Draco's body still lingers against him, and Harry releases his wrist just as they're out of the commons, warm up to his face.

On the Quidditch Pitch at night, Harry runs into the broomshed, brings two brooms out. They spend almost an hour flying around instead of sleeping, in the soothing abyss of silences, in the sounds of shouted chatter over winds, in echoes of laughter.

They finally land when the fatigue lays thick on both of them, breathless and hot and comfortably, achingly tired. With their brooms set aside, they sit on the ground.

Harry looks over at Draco, takes in the light rise and fall of his chest, steadying down slow and soft. The silver eyes fixated up beyond the world, and the wind playing up his already wind-swept, snowy hair. His neck was flushed, running up to his jaw, to his cheeks, sweat glistening all over his skin in the moonlight. An edge of a smile played at his lips, contented and serene.

"I like seeing you like this," Harry finds himself saying, without thinking. His brain is woozy, somewhat afar, from slumber trying to creep into his body.

Draco glances over at him with a raise of his brows, holds it for a few seconds of curious scrutiny, and then huffs, in that way he sometimes did, teetering just between mirthful and mirthless. He looks a bit like he's just walked out of a steamed shower. "Rumpled and sweaty?"

 _Beautiful_. The thought comes out of nowhere. "No, just... like you..." He fumbles with words for a few seconds, finally settles on, "...feel good."

Draco's eying him, obscure and long. Harry's heart tumbles over itself, racing wilder all over again, and he glances away, down at his hands, flushing warm at his own words.

When Harry looks up at him again, Draco has turned back to the night. He's smiling slightly, the same serene thing, just wider, mellowing around his eyes. Harry can't stop looking at him, at the pull of his mouth.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **References**
> 
> _"What did you see there?" Potter questions, watching the tee-vee very intently, a little too intently, as if trying to hide his curiosity. Despite the unclear question, Draco works it out right away. "In your dreams, I mean?"_
> 
> _He tries not to look at Potter, and says, "Everything I ever wanted."_
> 
> _"I already know that," Potter says. "But what is everything you wanted?"_
> 
> (Chapter Nine)
> 
> \---
> 
> I'm sorry for the delay, guys! This has been sitting around in my docs in a pretty awful shape, so I've been struggling to edit into something worthy of satisfaction, but then I sort of gave up in the middle because I didn't know what to do with it. I came back to it just recently, and finally whipped it up into something that seems of shape.
> 
> Thank you to all the wonderful people for your kindness and support in the last chapter! 💙


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a brief mention to past child emotional abuse (related to Harry's past with the Dursleys)

Draco is telling him about where he'd gone after St. Mungos, and what had happened, though Harry felt as if he'd left something out with the way he faltered, silenced, and then continued on. In the back of his mind, Harry is still wondering what it was, if he's only imagined it.

Draco clears his throat roughly, and there's a rustling sound on the other end, like he's shuffling around on the bed. Harry's learned from this that he's quite the restless person. "She wanted me somewhere _safe_." He says the word with a dry sort of emphasis. "Merlin knows how she considers the place where I'd be welcomed the least 'safe'."

Harry frowns. "Has anyone bothered you? Since Smith?"

"Not quite," Draco says. "But this doesn't mean that they won't in the future, does it. And _you_ having said whatever you did to Smith has made some of them rather cross with you for… ' _going to such lengths'…_ for someone like me. Minus your fans and those who believe I have Imperiused you somehow, that is."

Harry huffs, derisive. He didn't come back from the dead and fight Voldemort only to live his life according to the way strangers felt he should. "Then they can take that up with me."

Draco made a noise, a mirthless sort of laugh. "Oh, you're not the one they'll take that up with."

"I don't think they will."

"Don't you sound sure of yourself?" Harry can imagine the cock of his eyebrow to go with those words, and he presses a hushed smile into the finger against his cheek, gripping the coin tighter.

"For one: Headmistress McGonagall won't stand for it, and you know everybody's scared of her wrath. And two…" Harry pauses, licks his dry lips. He glances down at his fingers, idly rubbing sheets between them. He shrugs. "Well. They all know, don't they? That they can't do anything to you? Not unless they want me on their arse for it."

**…**

  
  


Now nearing mid-December, the beginnings of winter has spread throughout Scotland, permeating through Harry's cardigan sweater. He rubs his hands together, his wand in his sleeve, which he keeps taking out to cast a non-verbal warming charm in intervals.

"Will you be going back for Christmas, then? To your mum?" Harry asks him, pushes his hands into his pockets again.

Draco shakes his head. "No." He is watching the pavement, hands resting into the pockets of his coat. Harry remembers, vaguely, Narcissa's letter, telling him of the sickening air of dark magic left behind. The way it suffocates her, haunted Draco. "I owled her yesterday to tell her I won't be. She responded this morning. Told me it was alright, as long as I was well."

Harry nods, tearing his gaze away from Draco, finally, to follow the movement of his own steps. He pulls his hand out as a shiver runs up his spine, flicks his wand again.

"I…" Draco pauses. A knot of muscle tightens at his jaw, jumping with the convulsion of his throat, peeking from the wrap of his black rollneck. "It can't be good for her. To be alone in a place like that all the time. But—" He stops there, blinking. His breathing quivers through his nose, close-mouthed. "Well. It's not quite a place anyone should want to return to anymore."

Harry hums, agreeably. "Your mum's strong. I think she just needs you to keep in touch, is all. I'm sure that helps."

They continue a silent walk down the street. The plan was to stop at the sweets shop, first, and then the pub.

In the moment that follows, his mind works over a decision, and then settles with certainty. Harry looks up at Draco, a quirk of a smile at his lips. "Well. I'll be staying here too."

"Really?" Draco looks at him, his brow creased. Harry nods. "And what of your Weasleys?"

"It's our last year here, isn't it. I'll be visiting them all the time after school anyway. But a Christmas at Hogwarts, as a student — that won't happen again after this year."

Harry takes his wand out and casts another warming charm, rubbing his hands together to wring out its heat.

It's half a minute of it after that there's a heavy weight draping across his shoulders, warming down on his body. Harry lifts his head to look at Draco, who is now only in his rollneck. He's adjusting the coat over him better.

"There's no need," Harry says in a breath of a laugh, trying not to think too much about the gesture. To react like he may be thinking much about it at all underneath his words, the tone of his voice. "I'm not… you don't have to…"

Draco's lips tighten together, showing those pin-dot dimples again. "You keep trembling like an old man. It's irritating to watch."

He seems to have no struggle against the cold from the looks of it, but he is also much too thin, after his body having gone through the toll it did, months ago. 

Sometimes Harry almost forgot that. That it's only been months since Draco has gotten better.

He begins to shrug the coat off. "Well. _You'll_ get a cold too, you git."

"I'm not very susceptible to them," Draco says, taking his wrist to stop him. Harry's skin raises in goosebumps, perhaps due to the change in temperature. Except it seems laced with something else, something that flutters in his chest. "And I'm rather tolerant of the winter as well, you see. Also, _far_ better at warming charms, even without a wand."

Harry blinks, but settles down. He huffs, shaking his head. "Right." He feels too awkward, trying to argue over something so trivial. He laughs, trying to soothe the uneasiness in his chest and the dull racing of his heart. "Since when did you become so…?"

Draco waits, his face poised and set. He raises an eyebrow when nothing further is said. "So what?" 

_Sweet,_ is the word that comes to Harry's mind. But _sweet_ isn't a word that really fits Draco Malfoy all too well, and it seems much too odd to call him that aloud. So he doesn't.

Harry keeps the coat around him all the way until they return to their dorms at night, the faint scent of Draco's cologne at the collar of his coat constant in the back of his senses. It follows him all throughout their journey to Honeydukes, then the pub for a couple of drinks, and then back to Hogwarts, the Eighth Year commons.

Outside Harry's dorm, he draws the coat off his shoulders. When he holds it out, Draco takes it, draping it over his own arm with the elegance that is so effortlessly ingrained in his every movement.

They eye each other for a moment, not saying anything, perhaps waiting for the other to. But neither of them speak. Inexplicably, Harry finds himself smiling, half-grinning, his face splitting with it, strangely dizzied and heady from the warmth of the drinks in his system, the smell of the lingering cologne on him.

His heart is an odd flutter in his throat, his hands quivering from a jittery emotion, nerves or excitement, he can't quite tell. He's had too many drinks, maybe. He pushes his fists further in his pockets, bemused with himself. "Well, then. Good night."

Draco snorts, a quirk at a corner of his mouth, eyes bright. He tips his head in a nod, all slow and subtle grace. "Goodnight, then, Potter."

Harry moves a little too slow, only going inside his dorm once Draco's gone inside his own.

  
  


**…**

  
  
  


Draco walks inside the room, soundless but for Longbottom's breaths too loud in his sleep. He closes the door behind him, casts a wandless Lumos with a wave of a hand as he heads towards the bed. He slides the gloves off his fingers by the middle, throws them aside onto his trunk as he passes it by, and drops down onto the edge of his bed to tug his shoelaces off. He puts his shoes aside, and then looks down at the coat, still draped over his arm.

For an unmoving moment, all he does is stare down at it, his mind distant, his eyes gritty and tired. Then, his hands raise, a hesitant hovering of his fingers. Finally lower down in a delicate brush over the fabric, the phantom of heat still left behind. There is a memory trying to make its way into his mind, and he is trying not to let it in. 

It was easier not to before, with Potter's voice and company keeping him occupied. His chattering, drawing him back into reality, keeping him here. His silence, but the presence of him a vivid, painful awareness in the back of Draco's mind.

There is a memory trying to make its way into his mind, and he's been trying not to let it in, but now Potter isn't here and it slips through the worn and cracked barricade holding it back. And it grows, from a faded, muffled thing into a bright and clear memory that never happened. Harry, smiling, absently pulling Draco's coat closer around his shoulders. Raising himself on the ends of his trainers to kiss him. Potter, sitting there across the booth from him in it, arms atop the table as he talked, grinned, laughed.

He's staring at a spot on the floor, head swimming and hazy with drinks and dreams, firewhiskey in his system making everything dimmer, sharper, the yellow lights brighter, all at once. He inhales close-mouthed, heavy and slow, jaw set tight in a hardened knot of muscle.

There is a brief moment in which he can see himself like this from a distance, hunched over, head bowed between shoulders. A huff sounds throughout the room — his own, thick and shaky and nothing to do with humour, and with this distance comes a detached sort of marvel at how his life became that to that to this. What he'd been before a war, in the midst of a war, a dream. What's become of him now, here. Him, still with his head lost in dreams, still living life through their haze, only that he is now awake. Him, in love so painful and aimless it is almost entirely grief, in love so full and heavy and overwhelming he can hardly breathe from it.

"Fuck," Draco whispers, in an almost hysterical laugh. His fingers raise up, trembling, pressing to the furrow between his brows. Again, quieter, "Fuck."

…

Potter comes right in the middle of Draco's lessons with Luna, smiling in a chagrined way when he notices he's disrupted them.

"Sorry," Potter says, laughing awkwardly. "I didn't realise you guys were still doing wandless magic."

"Oh no, it's alright, Harry. You're always welcome to join," Luna says.

"Thanks, Luna," Potter says. She grabs his hand and squeezes, smiling, and he grins back at her. He then releases her hand, turning and walking back a few steps, as if to give them space, and then faces them again as he settles on the ground, crossing his legs. "You guys can keep going. I'll just watch."

Draco's become fairly deft at casting simple spells now. He's mastered charms, jinxes, spells and hexes over the course of these months, though he's still somewhat unsteady with the higher level ones. But Luna, seeming very pleased, says they've been fairly quick in time.

They're learning Transfiguration now, which is much harder in wandless magic. Wands are what focuses magic in order to cast a spell. When one is only using their hands, and even moreso, their mind, it should take a greater deal of concentration and energy to focus that magic by themselves. Transfiguration takes extra effort in this case.

Luna is holding a handful of leaves in her palm, transforming them into butterflies, giving him tips on how to draw his magic. How to focus it. How to mold it into the act of transfiguring.

It was hard, the first few lessons. Draco's only just begun to learn how to transfigure very small objects, and he's still an amateur at it, but he's managed to gain a mild semblance of control over the subject now. They become rose petals first, then they become chunks of strawberries, and they only become butterflies by nearly the end of the hour, Luna's eyes bright and her smile wide to a crinkle in her eyes, holding one of them on a finger. Draco waves them all away with a hand, watching them fly off towards the open blue skies. Watching one stray from its path, blur through the air, and make its soft landing on Potter's nose. Potter's startled, slightly cross-eyed blink at it makes Draco snort, smirking at him. Averting his gaze a second later when Potter's responding small smile threads its way into his heart, tightens into a knot.

Potter stays around with Draco and Luna until it's time for Quidditch practice, conversation branching out from the mundane into more, into past memories, into a sort of banter over each other's younger selves, carefully avoiding the uglier parts of history. At some point Draco had ended up shoving at him in his feigned annoyance, Potter making fun of him to Luna to the point of ridiculous impersonations, the two of them stupid and bickering to Luna's amusement.

And when he leaves—with a kiss to Luna's cheek, a wave and a grin to Draco as he straightens to his feet, turning and striding at a quick pace towards the castle before breaking into a jog—Draco watches him the entire way throughout, forgetting himself and all else. Unaware that he'd been doing it until he catches Luna's gaze on him, smiling pleasantly.

"You're in love with him," Luna says. It's much too forward.

The words of denial don't make their way out through his throat going tight, his lips parting ever so slightly, working around an answer that won't come. His heart has begun to batter harder. "It's not…I don't..."

"It's alright. I won't tell, promise."

It's dangerous, to have been so embarrassingly obvious. 

"I—" Draco licks his dry lips. _It's just Luna,_ he tells himself, and it's enough of a comfort and acquiescence. "Yes. Alright."

Luna leans a little close. "I think he found your wandless magic very impressive," she says, in that conspiratorial way she did at times, like there's a cryptic meaning hidden under the surface. She retreats back again, smiling at him wider.

  
  


…

  
  
  


On another night, Harry tells Draco about meeting Ron and Hermione. He listens from the other end of the Galleon, humming and interjecting with a comment or a repetition or a question occasionally, but he mostly sounds like he's verging on falling asleep.

"So, in short, Ron and I got on fairly quick. It took time to get used to Hermione, especially for Ron, but here we are."

Draco hums. There's a rustling sound, like he's shifting around, and it comes through in his voice, "Honestly, you know, I'd say I'm still getting used to Weasley."

Harry breaks into a small laugh. "Yeah. And I'd say Ron likely feels the same way about you."

Draco settles down, and then there's a hush falling over them. Harry rubs the coin with his thumb. The fatigue is creeping up on him, beneath the nostalgia of remembering his first meeting with the two most important people in his life. 

"They were the first family I've ever had. Ron and Hermione," Harry says, and isn't sure why he's talking about this. Still, the words leave him, perhaps loosened by his exhaustion, by the comfort that now settles between them at times. Draco knows, though only at a surface-level, of his history with the Dursleys, and it makes it just a bit easier to speak of what he does next. "My uncle used to say nobody could ever — " He pauses, trying to substitute with a word that makes it sound less sad and pitiful as _want_ does. "—care for somebody like me…I didn't really know what that — I didn't think I'd ever… I mean it'd always seemed to me like… like my parents were the only people who would have, until I came here. Until Ron and Hermione, and then all the Weasleys and..." Harry clears his throat, the ebb of loss arising in it for the names he left unsaid. "But it's just…"

"What?" Draco asks, when the pause has gone on too long.

"I don't know. Sometimes it's hard to remember that. That they do..."

"The entire Wizarding World adores you, in case you've forgotten," is what Draco says. It doesn't sound mocking. Just matter-of-factly.

"That's not the same thing. That's just… fanaticism. Or… I don't know. They've never even met me, have they? I mean… I mean _family,_ you know. Sometimes it's still hard to feel it. I know they think of me as a part of them, but it's hard to feel it. Like it's still possible they could… stop... at any point. And it's strange, I know, because they'd gone through a war with me, and they risked their lives for me over and over. They're… they're my family. But they're the only family I've ever had, you know? So I'll always feel what I feel for them, but I'm sort of just an addition. The Weasleys all had each other before me, but I won't have anyone after them, if it, you know, if it ever…"

The embarrassment begins to sink in deep, spreading a hot flush up his neck. It sounds much too lamenting. He wishes he didn't say anything.

"Yeah. Sorry. I'm not trying to sound like I'm… let's just talk about something else—"

"I've never had anyone outside of my family," Draco says. 

Harry stills, surprised, and then relieved. There's a pause after, and he thinks Draco might be trying to compose his grief away, how it still lingers. "Now I have, or had, no doubt about my importance to them, but… with blood relations and people who are obligated to you, there's always a question of how much you'd really matter to them without it." His voice goes a little fainter, quieter, here, something perhaps hidden under the surface. "Not to say it means nothing at all, then. It matters. But I do believe it must mean something more if they choose you."

"You can have blood relations and still not choose someone. As my relatives did."

"Maybe," Draco says, in a tone that sounded like a shrug. "But I couldn't make myself mean anything to anybody outside of them. Understandably. I was not, ah, a very—likeable—person. I was entertaining, yes, but not somebody anyone could give much of a damn about. This is only to say—" He clears his throat, obviously uncomfortable. "It's only to say that one would have to be a certain sort of person to mean the way you do to them—" He pauses. He pauses for a very long time, until Harry isn't sure he'll say anything more. And then, lower, with an indiscernible sort of huff, "and you...well, how can anyone not..."

He doesn't finish what he's trying to say, ending it on another rough, quick clearing of the throat. But in the dark of the room, Harry finds himself smiling a hushed smile to himself. He can't explain why the words settle warmer and sweeter in his chest when they're coming from Draco, but they do.

"Thank you."

Draco doesn't say anything, only clears his throat again, as if deeply embarrassed. There is a long silence, then, Harry looking down at the silver of sheets between his fingers, listening to the sound of winter winds outside and Ron's loud, even inhales and exhales in the room, the utter hush between him and Draco besides their soft breathing. Dwelling in the heated tenderness low in his stomach. 

Harry is just on the cusp of sleep when he speaks again, drowsy.

"Draco?"

"Hm?"

"You mean something to me."

**…**

  
  


The pristine snow coats the ground and the rooftops of cottages and shops in the Hogsmeade village. Holly wreaths hang on their doors. Christmas lights string along their walls in preparation for the upcoming occasion weeks from now. The skies are winter-grey above, holding a somber sort of beauty. 

Draco's cheeks and nose are pink against the white frost of the world around them, but the rest of him—his grey woollen hat and his white-blond hair falling out of it—suits the winter well. The crisp-white snow falls soft and slow on him, catching in his lashes, his hat, his scarf. Landing on the black of his coat.

"Do you remember Third Year here?" Harry asks, glancing over at Draco. His gloved hands are shoved into his pockets. "When those snowballs had started coming at you out of nowhere?"

Draco's forehead furrows for a split second. Only a split-second. Then he catches on, halting to a still with his mouth ajar.

Harry's face breaks into a grin. "Yep. That was me. Under my Invisibility cloak, throwing snowballs at you."

Draco turns swiftly to him, pointing one leather-gloved finger at him. "You _really_ are a right bastard, aren't you?"

Harry shrugs, still smiling broadly. "Maybe. But I say you right deserved it."

Draco steps back with a scoff, crossing his arms. "Nevertheless, you understand that this calls for vengeance?"

"Vengeance," Harry repeats, just before Draco balls up snow and smears it all over his face, thereby beginning a full-fledged snowball fight that lasts for an indecipherable amount of time.

It ends with Draco kneeling over him, knees on either side of his waist to keep him down. It ends with Harry letting him pin his wrists above him—long fingers circled around them, pressing them into snow—because he is laughing, platinum hair peeking out of his hat in soft messy waves and falling into his crinkling grey eyes, pinked cheeks raised and folded in a dimpled grin. 

He's wiping snow over Harry's cheek, one gloved hand curled into the snow beside Harry's head, leaning over him, and he is so beautiful. Exhilarated and wild like this, joyful. And Harry is struck with the absolute clarity of the thought, how loud it is, and by the tumble of emotions in his gut, softening low and deep — his heart, full to an ache in his throat again, an unsteady and slow pulse.

His smile fades, slowly, flickering out like a candle. A wisp of its smoke is left behind at his lips, still trying to hold. 

When Draco's grin fades as well, slow and bemused, his eyes seem to fill back with a sort of awareness with it, some dawning sort of realisation in the confused furrow between his brows, as if he's just coming back out of a trance. As if he forgot where he was for a minute and now he's remembering again.

Draco slips off of him quickly, seems sort of panicked. He looks ruffled up, with more of his hair out of his woollen hat, loose frizz of stray white-blond locks at either side of his temples, his eyes transfixed intensely at the snow-coated ground in front of him.

There are a lot of things that Harry can't make sense of at that moment. He feels slow and stupid, blank-minded, and all he ends up saying into the long, uncomfortable silence that follows is, "I need to go."

He dusts off his trousers, the back of his coat, pushing up to his feet in a haste. He adjusts his own knitted hat over his head, pushing it over the front of his hair, pulling it back again, adamantly not looking at Draco's tensed figure below him.

Harry just manages to mumble a confused, "I'll—I'll see you later," before he's turning around, walking away, leaving him there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!  
> Thank you so much for all your kind and supportive comments in the last chapter! I appreciated them deeply 💙  
> I have the next two chapters written down for the most part, so hopefully they will not be too far behind.
> 
> I hope you're all safe, well and healthy 💙


	8. Chapter 8

They don't talk for weeks after that confusing moment in Hogsmeade.

Harry doesn't try to seek Draco out, to bridge this strange gap between them. He only catches sight of him from a distance, sometimes when Draco isn't looking, sometimes right when he is, and they are both left floundering, circling around each other, neither of them approaching the other out of their own reasons.

Sometimes Draco would take a step towards him, and Harry would turn and leave, not entirely certain why. Only that something keeps him rooted back, an intangible sort of tension, like trying to break through a thick, rubbery film of resistance and confusion in his mind, like if he went to him, he wouldn't know how to act around him. And yet, a need, a desire to be with him again brimming just behind it.

But in the weeks after, with this distance, there comes a sort of clarity; that Harry thinks about Draco much too often, even when he isn't here and he has no reason to. That he's never thought of another boy like this, the way he thinks of Draco, with such urgency and intensity. With so much of his heart pulled towards him.

At first, Harry doesn't want to give it a name, or an explanation. He's afraid of what he will learn if he tries to work that out. He knows he likes Draco a little too much, and he thinks about him more than anyone he's ever thought about. But it doesn't _have_ to mean—

Not after having loved Ginny. Crushing on Cho. Imagining a future with a wife and children, craving it, dreaming of it in a lonely forest when he didn't believe he'll ever have it.

But Harry's head is full of him in the dead of nights, when it's no longer as easy to fall sleep because there is no voice on a coin next to his ear, a vivid awareness of his presence on the other side. And the strange, inexplicable comfort at times, of just being with him in silence or amidst words. His head is full of him—the most ridiculously mundane things. That one time he made Draco laugh harder than he ever has, and how carefree and beautiful he'd looked in that moment. The pin-dots at the corners of his lips. His drawings, tucked in a corner of his trunk, that Harry doesn't know why he keeps so carefully. Who he is with Luna, and that he is someone who stays awake into dead of nights to talk with Harry until they're asleep, who does oddly sweet little things like bring him sweets, his favourites in meals, leaves around funny drawings and notes for him, gives him his coat. That he is quiet in his strength and bravery. That Harry thinks often of the way he'd felt when Harry held him; warm, sharp planes of bones softened by skin, and how his hair smells like mint. How lovely he looked, laughing, with his winter hat and coat and scarf. 

That he didn't not like it. Having Draco on him.

That he's thinking about it, trying not to. Having him on him, under him, and about his mouth, grinning above him, dimples folding into his cheeks. The bright gleam of his grey eyes, set alight with exhilaration.

He's been thinking about kissing him, holding his hand. Holding him by the waist. Touching him somewhere warm and real. He's been noticing the pin-dots at the corners of his mouth when he was exasperated or smiling or smirking, the sharp line of his pale throat. His hair. His grey eyes. How nice his voice sounds on the coin.

He's never noticed these things about a boy. He hasn't noticed he's been noticing them about Draco. Or maybe he has. Just hasn't thought much of what it meant for him to be.

At first, Harry is afraid. At first he is afraid because they are friends, and they are fragile, and Draco is still recovering, healing. Tangling anything up into complications might just mean breaking everything apart.

At first he is afraid because he has only gotten out of a relationship three months ago, and he doesn't know what Ginny will think of Harry feeling this way about somebody else when Ron tells him she still misses him. And he doesn't know what Ron will think of the way he feels for Draco after everything, when Ginny might still be in love with him. At first he is confused because he has gone his entire life not knowing he can feel this way about boys (though that surely has much to do with a lack of time and opportunity at Hogwarts). Or maybe it's just one boy.

He finds Draco Malfoy beautiful. He'd known that he was in a peripheral sort of way even years ago, when he didn't like him at all, but this is something different. Something a bit more to do with the way he moved like his every movement was grace, the way it felt to be with him, not so much with the colour of his eyes and his hair (though that too).

But now they aren't talking. Days ago Draco would make a step towards him only for Harry to turn around and walk away, and sometimes he'd look at him in an unfathomable sort of way, but now he is adamant in avoiding his gaze, hollow and turned firmly past him whenever they cross each other, Harry's eyes following him until he's disappeared at the end of the corridor. He keeps wanting to say something, his voice at the tip of his tongue whenever he sees him, but he's always left without words.

The thing is that it can be so very easy. All he has to do is tell Draco, and he is his. But his feelings are muddled, difficult to decipher, and he's never tried very hard to understand these things, especially the more complicated and nuanced. He's never known how to. And he is still trying to process the idea that there's been something that has been a part of him for a long time, but he hadn't known it was until now. The way he'd thought of Oliver Wood sometimes, and Cedric Diggory. Draco Malfoy, fascinated by him half of his life.

When it's hard to make sense of things, he goes to Hermione, and asks her without mentioning anybody, though she does give him a long, considering look before she answers with an affirmation that, yes, it is possible for one person to like both boys and girls, and yes, it is perfectly alright to, and yes, it's fine and normal to realise it at a very later age, and yes, it's still real if it's just one person when you've believed for most of your life that you only like people of one gender. She doesn't ask him anything, but Harry gets the strong feeling that he wasn't being as subtle as he thought he was by framing his questions in a hypothetical manner, and that she was only respecting his wishes to disclose anything in his own time.

**...**

It's about two weeks later, at a New Years' party in the Eighth Years Commons, that they finally speak again.

The atmosphere is warm and nice, and there are drinks and people dancing all around to an upbeat tempo, some of them on their own, others caught in a dance with somebody else. Harry's sitting by Ron and Hermione, and Luna and Neville on the other side of them, when he sees him, making his way through the crowd of people for his dorm.

Luna jumps up from her seat when her eyes catch Draco, sliding through people and over to him. She is seemingly insistent on calling him over to their group, despite his protests, and then she swirls a thread of magic around his hand, smiling woozily, pulling at him. He's still protesting, annoyed, but his words die out right when he sees Harry, flicks to somewhere beside him. Quieter, to Luna, he says, "I have homework."

"We all have homework," Neville says, hiccoughs a laugh. "It's alright, Malfoy. You can dither over finishing it off the last few days with the rest of us."

"Why the _bloody_ Hell do we even have homework for Christmas hols?" Ron is asking, and then Hermione is explaining to him the merits of it, with their NEWTs coming up and how everybody will slack if there isn't any pressure—

And Harry is looking at Draco, but Draco is adamantly not looking at him, is telling Neville that he has no interest in dithering around at the very last minute like the rest of them, and a part of Harry wants to say something, and another part of him just wants to grab him by the wrist or hand and pull him next to him — or on him, but that might just be his glass of elf-wine talking. 

Draco accepts only one drink and stays for a bit, if only to appease Luna. But he is quiet for the most part, sitting on the very end of the couch next to Luna until he excuses himself. He places his glass on the closest surface, a small sidetable, and then stands to his feet, setting towards the dorm. Harry's gut is clenched, still, has been all the way through — warmth bubbling low, his heart beating fast in an erratic flutter.

It's just for a second, but Harry sees him, through the blurred wave of dancing people in the distance between them. He sees him standing at the door of his dorm, one hand on the frame, the other around the doorknob, his head bowed slightly. He lifts his head, a faltering movement, looking right at Harry. Maybe Draco realises that he's been seen, a few seconds later, because he then looks down quickly. Away.

And then he slips inside the room, shutting the door. The music is throbbing along to the throb of Harry's heart. Somehow, it's enough for him to work over a decision in his mind, to ease some more of his inhibitions, his inexplicable hesitance and low courage. More than anything, he's just not able to think of much else beyond what he wants right now. How much he does.

So he finishes up his drink in a quick gulp for an extra push, and then stands, excusing himself as well. He distantly hears Ron ask him where he's going, and Harry tells him just as distantly something vague, the loo, but probably was too low to be heard under the music. He moves through the crowd of dancing people, apologises quickly for accidentally spilling somebody's drink over, and then towards the door of Draco's dorm.

Draco's head is snapping up, sat on the edge of the bed, when Harry opens the door. He's breathing in a very controlled way, blinking a little fast. 

For a second, there isn't much to do but look at each other in the distance between them — the uncertainty. Draco's face has gone very still, grey eyes cold and bare with something that can just as much be anger as it can be hurt. The shame makes Harry feel small, shrivelling up in his chest.

"I—" Harry says, falters, doesn't really know what it is that he wants to say. Too many things, _I'm so sorry_ and _I want you and I think I have for a while_ and _let me_ _kiss you, please_ — nothing at all but to kiss that mouth of his, soften away the hard muscles around the tightness of his jaw. "Hello," Harry says instead, dumbly.

"Get out," is what Draco snarls to that, with a flare of his nostrils. "If that is all you have to say after ignoring me for weeks, then spare me the rest of this conversation. I have better things to do than to listen to you."

"Wait, I — I do have more to say," Harry says, quickly slipping inside and clicking the door shut behind him. He pushes his hands into his trouser pockets, looking down at his shoes. "I was an absolute tosser for ignoring you, and I'm sorry. I just... I needed time."

"Right, yes. Time for _what,_ exactly?"

"Time to, er—to work some things out." Draco looks very much on the cusp of his patience, likely at his dawdling about, but seems to be reigning it in. Harry swallows. "I should have said something to you."

"Bit of a delayed realisation, wouldn't you say," Draco says, coldly.

But whatever expression Harry has on his face, undoubtedly a reflection of the whirlwind of his guilt and shame, seems to smoothen some of the hardness of Draco's face. His lips press together again, those pin-dot again that Harry's been noticing too often these past few months. He breathes a sigh, close-mouthed through his nose, glancing away in a private sort of gesture. Almost as if caving to something within himself.

"Well then. Did you work them out?" he asks, a hint of something thin and wry quirking up at his lips, though not quite a smile. He looks up at Harry, looks a little like he's faintly bored of this conversation, but Harry knows by now that usually it means he's trying not to show something underneath the surface. "Or perhaps you need another two weeks of ignoring me to work them out some more?"

"No. I've worked them out, I think. Not entirely yet, because for most of my life I didn't know it was even possible to — I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but I think I know one thing for sure."

Draco's face is that of somebody not understanding a thing, but still trying very hard to humour him. "And that is?"

For a moment, nothing is said. The glass of wine in Harry's system is just enough to make everything feel a little far away, a little bright and dim all at once. He's swathed in gold under the string of twinkling lights along a wall, catching in his silver eyes and his platinum hair, all over him, and Harry can't remember wanting to kiss somebody like this for a long time. The last time being when he was in the forest, missing Ginny—

And then the shame and guilt is sinking in, and he's almost about to turn around and walk away. Just walk away right there, thinking of Ron and what he'd look like if he knew, thinking of Ginny and the way she'd feel knowing of this, these feelings that are no longer for her. 

Thinking of the only family he's ever had.

But there's him — Draco, and then it's hard to think of anything but him. How much Harry wants. 

There's a memory, of him at seventeen and small in his father's arms, in his home, rasping, _I can't be sure_ as his gaze roves over Harry's face, the kind of quietly strong and brave that Harry's come to realise he is much later. There's a memory, of him on the floor of a cellar and in a hospital bed and Harry doesn't know if he will ever wake up again, and it scared him then but it _terrifies_ him now to think about that, that Draco could never have been here at all.

And he's on the verge of walking out of Harry's life forever, kissing him goodbye. He's standing in front of him by the Thestrals, coming back. And he's talking to him on magical coins, flying with him in the dead of nights on empty Quidditch fields, and he's trying to get better and be better. He's bringing him sweets and sending him ridiculous drawings in class and falling asleep under skies full of astronomy with him. 

And he is here, now, against all the odds. He is _here_ , and he is alive, and he is beautiful, looking at Harry very still with a small line between his brows, waiting for him to speak. He is now more bemused by his silence than impatient, by whatever it is that Harry must look like right now.

It's a blur, the seconds and steps that follow. Harry doesn't entirely remember the way it happened, just that he is going to his knees in front of him, one after the other to the floor—just that Harry's hands are around his face, so close to his own that the very tips of their noses are brushing.

Draco is clearly baffled, frozen with it. Up close like this, he can see the dark circles around Draco's eyes. They'd eased over the last few months, now back again, but Harry hasn't been sleeping all too well these weeks either.

It's quiet again, for a moment, but for their breathing, but for the music that echoes on still outside this room — made low in quality by a sound-amplifying spell. Something with a much slower piano melody now, playing up into the quiet of the room.

"I—" Harry says, voice fading. It's a low rasp, his throat dry. "I think I like you a little too much."

Draco's eyes slip to a close, slow, the jut of his throat convulsing. He isn't coming any closer, but he isn't moving away. "I think you're drunk," he murmurs, a warm breath against Harry's lips.

"Hardly," Harry says, swallowing hard. Staring at his mouth. "No more than you."

"Then I won't be your experiment."

"Is it really so hard to believe that I just want you?"

Draco's breaths is heavy in his chest, held in his throat. His eyes are heavy-lidded, a mellow frown in his forehead, not unlike the way he'd looked when he told Harry _you were the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen._

But Draco's head turns away, just slightly, and his breath releases in an exhale, as if freed as soon as he wasn't looking into Harry's face. "You don't even like boys."

"I didn't know I did. But you," Harry trails off, laughs with his gaze trying to meet the grey of Draco's eyes, a little tremulous with nerves and fear and the way his breath sticks high in his throat like an ache. Draco does look at him, then. "God, you." He swallows hard, gaze coming back to rest on Draco's mouth, hunger unfurling at the core of him, pulling tight.

Draco's throat convulses again, his eyes roving down from Harry's eyes, over his nose, onto his mouth. His expression has taken on a shade of emotion, something desperate and raw and just as hungry, maybe even more, reigned back. The last song at the party has ended, changed to another, a distant echo. There's laughter somewhere afar, the rise of a muffled hubbub outside, and in hardly a voice, Harry's saying to him, "I'm going to kiss you now, okay?"

Draco doesn't say anything, is only breathing shallow and slow, staring at him.

Then he stutters a bit forward, stops there with the very small part of his lips near Harry's, closing them in order to swallow hard again. He closes his eyes too, tight and hard with a firm set of his jaw, as if there's something he's trying to push back within himself. He looks brittle and pained, for a reason Harry can only half-fathom, thinking of two boys in a robe shop seven years ago.

So Harry puts his hands to his face, half of them careful at his jaw, and kisses him.

It's soft and tentative at first, all clinging and damp lips, Draco's upper lip between the closing of Harry's kiss. It isn't much different from kissing girls, not like Harry had thought it would be — only rougher lips, a stronger jaw under his hands, and it occurs to him that he knows this. He knows this already from a goodbye kiss next to a hospital bed. Except it wasn't quite like this, wasn't quite as raw and aching and sweet.

The very tips of their noses brush together when Harry angles his mouth over Draco's, parting along with this, tongues pressing together. Draco's breath shudders, a sharp exhale through his nose, the kiss slow and slick and warm. Careful. It's a few seconds after that Harry feels something cool drip over the back of his knuckles.

Harry draws away, quickly, letting go of his mouth, muttering a worried, "Draco?"But Draco is shaking his head, seeming unable to speak. He'd pressed his forehead against Harry's just as the kiss broke, and his eyes are closed as his hands, trembling, run up over his biceps, his shoulders, back down. There's a very slight smudge of water under his eyes still, clinging to his lashes when he looks up at Harry after a very long moment, a hint of a quivering, slight smile at the corner of his mouth. 

"Am I really that bad at kissing?" Harry asks, in a laugh, just wanting to make Draco laugh too. Draco does, though it's only a thick huff of one. "This has happened before, you know. I've got to wonder now if it's really something with me."

"Horrid," Draco says, a little low and raspy, another half-hearted huff. His face is still very close to his own, tilted down towards his lips. "I shouldn't have opened my eyes."

Harry laughs, and then it fades, because Draco's eyes are still red-rimmed, and then he's blinking as he turns his head away, hands still trembling around Harry's biceps. Harry doesn't think he entirely understands why he looks the way he does, wants to ask but he knows Draco doesn't like to talk. So he just draws him in against himself, tugging his face in against his shoulder by the back of his head, brushing a hand up through his hair.

The moment settles a bit later, and Draco draws himself away with his hands running down his face.

When he's calmer, Harry draws him carefully back onto the bed by the shoulders, climbs up next to him and takes him up into his arms. Draco's eyes still red-rimmed and of a bright sheen, but as soon as they're settled, he catches Harry's mouth with his own, head craned a little over his shoulder to reach him, the heavy kissing leading to Harry on his arms, head over Draco's and a hand on his face, and then Draco does laugh into his mouth, a bit tremulous. Harry stops to look down at him, nose and temple pushed over his, grinning, the two of them breathless and heady and smiling stupid.

Draco wandlessly locks the door after, when they're too tired for any more. That's something Harry's been liking very much for a long while as well, whenever he sees him using his wandless magic. He watches him draw the curtains like that too, thinking of how he hadn't realised before that his enjoyment for wandless magic extended exclusively for Draco.

With a lift of Draco's wand up at the ceiling, the vast, black sky comes into form, the stars scattering across it. Harry whispers Draco's name into the endlessness, watches them draw together into a glowing, dotted outline of the head of a dragon. Under it, they lie close together, both exhausted by the night and the half-arsed sleep for weeks. Draco's legs are tangled and brushing with Harry's, Harry's arm loose around the line of his spine, hand light at Draco's lower back. Their faces, so close on the pillow they're sharing air, just drowsily watching each other.

Still, a song from the party throbs through the walls. Harry worries that somebody might be looking for him, but is also half-certain most of the people who'd want to would be passed out before they could. Except for Hermione, maybe. He isn't sure how Draco feels about other people knowing, but Harry is still uncertain if he wants anybody to know yet.

But all he wants right now is to be close to Draco, to hold him, and to sleep right here. Just sleep right here, next to him.

And so like that, they fall asleep, close and warm.


	9. Chapter 9

To be kissed by Potter is to live a thousand moments in a few seconds, familiar and strange all at once.

Draco had kissed him in a life of such vividity his mind can hardly comprehend it anymore, and then here, once, in a hospital — short-lived, featherlight tentative. He knows this, in reality as well as dreams, but it's something else entirely to have Potter kissing back, wanting as well. To know, even if as a very disconnected fact, that this is real. This is nothing that he will have to wake up from.

Potter's kiss tastes like warm wine, feels like home, pulling at the violent bubbling in the deepest pit of his stomach, heated and tender beneath his skin, from his spine to his cheeks to his scalp. It is a raw and cavernous hunger all the way to his bones, held together tight, by stitches, in the tremors of his body. Some part of him is certain that to allow the absolute depth of his feelings to slip through is to terrify Potter almost as much it terrifies himself. 

It is something that overrides this lifetime of his father's shame and disappointment for Draco's display of emotions. It's hard to care in that moment, to even remember when his head is already so full of another lifetime, to have it rise above the intensity of his feelings. 

And the way he feels is absolutely terrifying.

Here is a boy that he's wanted since forever, has had and yet not at all for another forever, and now here he is, finally, _finally_ , here he is, right between his hands and holding his fingers to Draco's face with a fragility as sweet and careful as the way he's kissing him.

Here is the one thing that he can no longer bear to gain and lose, that can break him in ways he can't bring himself to imagine should it come to that, and it's either that he latches on to it now for a chance that might not work or give it up right then and there, because even now blinded by love and desperation and love there is the smallest corner of clarity somewhere in the back of his mind, that can sense that there is too much that is not right with this picture. 

Except that the rest of him hardly seems concerned. Except that the rest of him is more interested in the way Potter feels like a home that is an intangible universe away, and the way he holds his face and tries to make him laugh through his horrible, overwhelming tears, and how that rises high above his father's shame overlapping with his own.

It doesn't matter because Potter is here, and he's kissing him, and he's drawing him up in his arms on the bed, and then they're kissing again, and it's heady and brilliant and painfully good, everything loud and bright and clear. He feels more awake than he ever has, in that moment. Him, laughing thickly, a tremulous sound into Potter's mouth. Potter grinning back at him, temple and nose against his. 

Overhead, the stars scatter across the sky, Draco already half-asleep in the cocoon of his heat and solidity and comfort, to the sound of his name in Harry's voice, the reverberating of it in his chest under the curl of Draco's fingers. All his good and joy and comfort. Forgetting, in the minute just before he falls over the edge, where exactly he is.

When he startles awake that night with a cry half-buried in his throat, he isn't alone. Harry is there right in front of his eyes flying open. It takes a second to register it's him, with his face and the green of his droopy, half-mast eyes in the starlights, but it's his voice shushing him softly and his hands all in his hair, running featherlight over his face and shoulders and down his back, the bumps of his spine. His arm is pulling him closer when Draco finally does reach calm and steady breaths, and his face is very close to his own on the pillow. The pounding of his heart is settling down—just by the sight of his face, the warmth of his hands, his breaths steady against Draco's chin. He tries to stay awake to watch Harry's eyes slip shut, watch him return to slumber first, but is too tired and falls asleep quickly after.

The next morning, Longbottom isn't there in the room with them, fortunately, and everybody is passed out all through the common rooms by the time they awake at the break of dawn, so it isn't difficult for Potter to sneak out back into his own room, Draco pushing him out through the door after he's kissed Draco on the cheek instead of mouth because they both have terrible breath as of now. Though Draco privately thinks he wouldn't have minded much if he did, because he's kissed his bad breath mouth enough times in the Dreams to be used to it.

As pertaining to the way they were here, not a lot changes as the first day goes. They arrange to see each other at their usual alcove on the third floor for breakfast, but are a little shy of each other, still trying to work out how to go about again after the shift between them last night.

Potter kisses him behind a statue in the corridor they'll have to part ways from, asks Draco to be by the Great Lake for lunch, and grins much too brilliantly at Draco on his affirmation before he kisses him again, hard enough this time that it bobs his head back.

He watches Potter leave for his classes from behind the statue of the knight, with his heart still in his throat, slow and erratic.

Draco waits a few minutes before he slips out into the corridor. There are people walking by, not paying much attention his way, but it never hurts to be extra careful.

Out in the open of the Great Lake, they just talk and eat together as usual. Potter asks him if he wants to tell anybody about them. Draco doesn't, because the world here is very different from the world the potion created in his mind. Potter isn't ready either, not yet anyway. He'll want to tell his friends, he says, but he wants to wait for some more time because he's still processing things, and isn't ready to come out, and he knows Ronald might not take it so well that he's with him so soon after Ginevra, and he knows nothing about how she will feel, and he looks so guilty and afraid that Draco is in part hurt by it and in part wanting to kiss him until it goes away.

Draco might like to tell Luna, at some point, because he trusts her, but there is still some part of him that is just waiting for this to fall apart, as if this might be a dream after all. Maybe he just wakes up again. Maybe Potter decides it's not quite working, and then what will he do, because he's loved him too long and too much and Potter has only just started to feel anything like this for him. And should he decide he doesn't want Draco, he won't feel as much for it, but Draco might just feel like he shouldn't have woken up from those dreams.

Part of him wants to run, to leave Potter first, but then what is he left with? It seems these days that Potter is the only thing that makes him feel anything close to real.

There is too much wrong with all of this, too much that Potter doesn't know, too much he will never understand and feel the way Draco feels for him, and he is Potter. He is not Harry.

There is too much that isn't fair.

Quidditch Practice comes by and Potter has to leave, and this time it's only a tangle of their hands between their bodies, a thumb over Draco's knuckles. Potter smiles at him again, so painfully fond and gentle it hurts, but it doesn't entirely make sense why it does.

At some point after Draco finds himself in the bathroom, nauseated and heaving for air and shaking. The vague sense that there's something fumbling out of the hands of his control is a constant, small part of him, but it bears down on him with the weight of a tsunami this time, drowning him under. There are too many things that can go wrong now in the one thing Draco's life is narrowed down to. Too much he can lose, too much that he might not end up having in the end. And it's not the same. Nothing is the same as it was _there_ and it never will be because nothing will ever be as perfect as his dreams, and that is a fact of this life that will always weigh on his joy.

Because Harry had loved him with an impossible effortlessness and fervor, and in a life like this, it doesn't seem possible indeed.

So, even when Potter is lovely and beautiful, even when Potter kisses him and smiles at him and looks at him like Draco genuinely makes him happy—

Even when Draco has him, it doesn't quite feel like he does.

But Draco loves him. Merlin, he does.

He loves him more than he'd ever thought it was possible to love anybody.

Some days are like these, where his restlessness and hunger feels like it will never be satisfied — where all he wants is to go back.

But some days, when Draco is with him, he almost feels at home, almost feels real again, the way he did in his dreams.

  
  
  


…

  
  
  


It's a bit strange at first, even if Harry likes it all very much — but it feels a little off-kilter, trying to relearn the way they were, only now there's another layer over it that allows them to kiss behind statues and in alcoves, and fall asleep close and warm under invisibility cloaks in the corners of towers, and sneak in and out of each other's beds some particularly courageous nights and hold hands hidden between their bodies at the edges of lakes.

But then, little by little, it begins to fall away, and it becomes easy to be with him again, and Harry doesn't get sweaty hands anymore when he takes Draco's, not out of nervousness anyway. He doesn't constantly doubt himself and wonder if Draco likes what he's doing, despite Draco seeming fairly open, if moderate in his reactions — does he like it when Harry kisses him on the cheek when they're alone, trails another two down his jaw and neck when he's particularly excited to be with him? Does he like it when Harry grabs him by the waist and kisses him like he's always dreaming through classes of doing? Does he mind that Harry's hands are sweaty and hot when he holds his and that he sometimes laughs a bit too much at everything because Draco makes him nervous and warm from his chest to his face?

He doesn't think Draco does mind it. Even when he's smirking at his flustered demeanour, there's always a hint of something mellow about it. Even when his reactions are controlled about the things Harry does, about the way he can't stop touching him, he can now tell Draco likes it, because he always runs his fingers through his hair after every one of Harry's zealous, greeting kisses, under the pretense of fixing the front of his messy hair, and when Harry takes his hand, Draco is never the one to let go first. Harry hadn't thought Draco was the sort of person to like things like that, and certainly not one to tolerate sweaty hand-holding, but apparently he is.

There are days, weeks, where Draco is guarded and low all over again, that might have to do with where he'd been in the war. Sometimes, he asks, _is this real?_ and Harry tells him it is, but he doesn't know how comforting it is to hear that when his dreams were more real than reality itself.

On a day like this, he takes Draco to a deserted alcove and lets him rest under his arm and against his shoulder, quiet and tired, with their backs against the bricked walls, the Lumos of a torchlight casting them aglow. They huddle together, and Harry talks into his hairline, because he always thinks that maybe Draco finds that comforting, the way he did when Harry had sat at his bedside and talked until he was hoarse, except that it means something entirely different now. 

_You do? Listen to everyone around you?_

_Not to everyone._

Maybe it's just the sense of somebody being there. Maybe it's his words, something to focus on that isn't his own thoughts.

Maybe it's his voice, the way Harry finds Draco's voice comforting on his sleepless nights. Maybe it's Harry. Just Harry. Something about that thought makes his heart hurt. 

There are days when he's somehow calmer and more comfortable and open, more at home with Harry somehow. 

"One of these days," Draco is saying, pushing at the tie knot at his collar with a thumb and forefinger. He picks off the coat from the bed, putting it around Harry. "One of these days, you are going to learn to wake up on time."

Harry laughs, pushing his arms quickly through the sleeves as Draco went off to grab his scarf. "It might help to have a snooty, bossy boyfriend around to wake me up on time."

Draco's steps falter, but he resumes then without much of a hitch, and he's pink in the cheeks, huffing as he comes over in front of him. He's wrapping the scarf around Harry's neck, swatting Harry's hands away and buttoning up the rest of his coat, quick and precise and done within seconds. "Yes, yes. Merlin forbid the Saviour of the Wizarding World ever lift a finger to help himself."

He pulls Harry's hat onto his face, deliberately, and when the hat lifts back up onto Harry's messy hair, it clears his way to vision of the quirk of Draco's grin, crooked canines hooked over his lower lip. Harry doesn't know what he looks like, but it must be as ruffled and exasperated and fond, achingly fond, as he feels. He's certain much of the rest has slipped away, left behind only the warmth in his chest by the way Draco's smiling, all crescent-moon dimples on cheeks and one raised than the other, as he pushes Harry's hair up into his hat with his fingers. He pulls Harry in by the scarf, kisses him. He likes to do that, Harry's noticed too. He likes to take Harry's hands and warm them inside the pockets of his own coat, when Harry is cold and they're alone. Harry likes that too.

"Now run, you disastrous fool," Draco says, and grabs his hand, pulling him along for a run through the empty commons and for the kitchens. There's only about ten minutes left for breakfast until the classes start.

After Quidditch practice, he's always there at the alcove with dinner and desserts for Harry, and sometimes he does things like reach out and wipe away a smidge of food on the corner of Harry's mouth, or pick an eyelash off from under his eye, or fix up Harry's hair with a run of his hands through the front of it.

Sweet little things he's never imagined Draco would ever want to do. 

The strangest thing is that he does it like he doesn't notice he is at all. As easy as breathing.

Sometimes in particularly private places, Draco will kiss him and kiss him, and settle over his lap as he does, with his hands around his jaw, the nape of his neck, half in his hair. They don't do much beyond kissing, and tugging up the tails of each other's school shirts and push their hands up under them, to splay them over the heated skin of each other's bodies, and Harry is very much fine with that. But he thinks about it a lot. He thinks about a lot of things a lot when he's alone, when it comes to Draco. He thinks about a lot _more._

Harry doesn't realise how obvious he is about watching Draco pass him by in corridors, meeting his eyes with a quick smirk, until he turns away and finds Ron staring at him.

"You're spending a lot of time with him these days," Ron says in the common room a bit later, more to the chess pieces than to Harry. "Malfoy."

"Yeah. I just — you know. He's been helping me study for the NEWTs," is what Harry says, the first thing that comes to mind that might make sense to Ron. Ron's face is unreadable, and he looks down at the board, moving his piece. There's a pause. Another turn passes by, Harry's, and then it goes back to Ron. "Ginny was talking about you the other day."

Harry's movements hitch, falter. He finally moves, putting a pawn one step forward. "Oh. What'd she say?"

"Nothing, just — that stunt you pulled in the match to get the snitch." Ron was smiling a little, a small huff, remembering it. "She was proud of you."

Harry tries to smile, say something. He ends up saying nothing much beyond that, swallowing as he looks down at the chessboard. A pawn.

Sometimes he catches Hermione eying Draco some way, whenever he, Luna and Neville join them at the pub. If Harry wasn't painfully aware of him before, he certainly is now, of the heat of him, the little space between them, of the brush of their arms and knees under the table. Maybe they sit too close, or Harry looks at Draco too much, smiling, his attention lingering on the sight of Draco's, or just on the sight of his face. Harry makes a conscious effort to do a lot less of that.

With NEWTs coming up in three months, Hermione is a little more ruthless in pressuring Harry to study for them. She looks a fair bit exasperated when she catches Harry studying the Marauder's Map instead, searching for Draco before he's off to meet him, but lets him go with an insistence that he spends time studying while he's there — _yeah, what else am I going to do there, 'Mione?_ He'd say, huffing, walking backwards.

Not studying, Harry supposes in secret when he is there, because he's too distracted by Draco's mere presence beside him, engrossed into his own book, or by the smell of his hair when he's leaning against Harry's shoulder, explaining something to him. He's busy trying to listen, to not think about kissing him instead, because Draco is always annoyed about it after they get carried away. Harry must look absolutely stupid and dopey, smiling at him, because sometimes Draco just breaks off with a huff and a dart of a glance away, and just settles back against his shoulder again.

…

"Neville says he thinks you sometimes have somebody else in bed with you," Luna says. Pauses. "Oh, I'm not sure if I was supposed to tell you that."

Draco huffs, trying to transfigure a flowerpot into a bird. Luna isn't the only one who _sees_ things. Longbottom's bed is empty a lot of these nights, and he's seen the way he smiles at her when she isn't looking. He slants a smirk at her, quick, half-distracted by the task at hand. "Did he tell you that when he was in bed with you?"

"Yes, actually," Luna says, a little too innocently.

Draco's face falls fast, frowning. He blinks at her. "Ah. I—I see." 

"It's nice to sleep next to somebody, isn't it?" she says. "Comforting."

Draco clears his throat. "You didn't say the two of you were together."

"Oh. It's very recent," Luna waves off, and does not take his bait for diverting the topic. Draco isn't sure if this is deliberate or not. "So who was it?"

The person in question comes in right that second — worn trainers, hands in pockets, pulling out of it right as he drops to the ground next to Draco, grinning at him, cutting them off unknowingly. "Hello." Potter's smile lingers on Draco a second too long, upper lip over his lower lip around it, and then he looks at Luna. "Hi."

"Hello Harry," Luna says, smiling at him. She glances at Draco, and then back to Harry. "I was just saying to Draco, isn't it nice to be sleeping next to somebody?"

Potter doesn't move, his smile faltering, staring at her. "Oh," he finally says, trying to hold onto his expression. "Yes. I'm—I'm sure it is, Luna." He clears his throat. "Ron and Hermione can, um — can attest to that. Because… you know, Ron almost never returns at night anymore."

"Do we really need to be discussing this?" Draco asks, faintly disgusted at thoughts that he refuses to entertain.

But Luna's words vaguely drift through his mind that night, It's _nice to sleep next to somebody, isn't it?_ _Comforting_.

 _Comfort_ , Draco thinks, droopy eyes roving up over wild raven hair—down to the slight crook at the bridge of a nose, and the lashes on cheeks, lining the edge of closed eyes, and him, swathed under dim blue lights. Potter's chest is a gentle heave of slow, steady breathing against Draco's chin, face so close their noses were brushing, his arm warm and loose around his waist. Draco's eyes burn, gritty with fatigue, locked still on the sight of his comfort. 

All his joy and good and comfort.

The cushioning charm on the floor of the Astronomy Tower is a bit of a relief, Potter's back wedged against the wall, but trying not to shift around too much under the Invisibility cloak lest if fall off doesn't help sleep come easy. Still, Potter's arms wound tight and warm around him settles the malaise around his heart, as if it's been pushed out of place and now finally fitting in its cavity. The things he doesn't want to think about, they fray at the edges of his mind, and he focuses instead on counting Potter's breaths, one inhale, one exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

He falls asleep to the sound of them.

...

When Potter finally shows up much too late for their studying session, he's on the verge of snapping, irritated, "Where the hell were you? I've been waiting—"

And then he stops, trailing off. Potter was slowing to a stop in front of him, hands in his trouser pockets.

He looks weary, like he's just come out of a battle. His gaze is a little too faraway, and there is something heavy about the way he moves.

"Sorry, I—" His voice is barely there when he speaks, hoarse, breaking off. He clears his throat, a line between his brows, not seeming to be able to look up from Draco's shoes, trying to say, "I was at Madam Aileen's and it, um—it took longer than I—"

It's easy to follow the deep, harrowing ache of his own heart and grab Potter's hand out of his pocket, jostling it out into his own, pulling him along to the way of the staircases. Potter stumbles behind him, after him, by the suddenness of it all.

The thing about his dreams was that nobody was ever sad. Nothing ever hurt. Nobody ever had to hurt unless it was because of something as certain as loss.

Here, in their deserted alcove, sitting there with their bags toppling onto each other next to them, he misses that with an almost sickening intensity. All he wants is to ease whatever grief has the boy he loves looking like this, all haunted and tired, his eyes red-rimmed now in a way it hadn't been when his face wasn't half-nestled into the middle of Draco's shirt, his body sprawled between his legs. Potter's fingers are curled loose at the base of his spine, gripping at him.

He sits there, a silent presence, only soothing hands in Potter's hair, over his biceps, his shoulders.

"Talk to me," Potter mumbles, so he tries to think of what he can talk about.

"I had a dream about us once," Draco says, a while after. He pushes his hands through Potter's hair, looks down at the mess of it, the side of his face. "Fourth Year Yule ball. We were dancing."

"Not very good at dancing."

"You weren't very good in my dream either," Draco says.

Potter laughs at that, a low, stilted sound. "Okay." He shifts his cheek against Draco's ribs, tilting his gaze up at him. "And then what happened? In your dream?"

Draco's hands moves down to his cheeks, his jaw, smirking down at him. "You caught your foot in somebody's dress and fell on your face is what happened."

"That could have actually happened," Potter says, huffing, and there's a twitch at a corner of his lips, and Draco loves him. He loves him with a ferocity so painful it may as well just be pain all on its own.

"It could have," Draco repeats, quietly, smiling back.

"Do you like dancing?" Potter asks, voice a bit croaky, putting a hand on Draco's thigh.

Draco hums, feigning contemplation. "Perhaps that depends on whether my partner isn't a clumsy oaf."

Potter smiles a little. "Shame. I suppose you wouldn't like dancing with me then."

Draco smirks slightly, threading their fingers together on his thigh. "I might like dancing with one clumsy oaf."

…

_The first thing Draco searches for in the room is him, walking down the staircase with a hand sliding over the rail._

_He finds Harry not too far from the bottom of the staircase, looking back at him. A small smile has turned up at a corner of his lips. Draco returns it, a quick, distracted flick down to look where he's stepping on the stairs. When he looks back up, Cho Chang is saying something, leaning close to him, and Harry's eyes are tearing away, turning to her._

_And then comes Cedric Diggory, offering him his arm and walking him along the carpet._

_The Great Hall has been turned into a ball. All the dining furniture is removed, and in their place is a vast expanse, only one length of the table left at the very end of the room, to be full with food after the opening waltz. A grand chandelier hangs from the centre of the ceiling, intricately patterned and polished. On the walls are rounded sconces beside auburn curtains, setting the entire hall bright and warm in golden colours._

_When the two set of dancers, distanced across the room, come to meet in the middle, all small steps to the slow of music, hands raising, hovering in an almost hold, footsteps turning in a half-circle. His eyes meet brilliant green and a faint quirk of a smile, diagonal to him - locked gazes even in the turn of the dance with their own partners. A quick and small smirk, breaking across his own lips, just as the turn ends, and they change hands, turning around the other way in half-circles of small steps, the other curved over their partner's._

_That was when the actual waltz was to begin, except that there's a scrape and a thud, and then a hush, just before noises of sympathy and laughter fill the room. The dance and music has paused. Harry is quickly trying to fumble his way up and off the floor, slipping a bit on the ground. He's uttering apologies to Chang as he tries to fix up the layers of her dress. Diggory has gone over to ask if he was alright._

_The dance has to repeat a moment later, embarrassingly, as everybody gets into position again, Harry seeming to be too mortified to look up anywhere anymore._

_After, he finds Harry sulking by the food table, leaning in close to his ear in order to be heard over the music, smirking with his hands folded back. "I wasn't made aware of the changes to the choreography," Draco says."You falling on your arse, amarvellous addition!"_

_"Shut up, Draco," Harry says, shoving at him and making him stagger back a few steps, Draco laughing at him, stepping forward again. Harry drops his face onto his shoulder, groaning. "That was bloody mortifying. Even Ron was — why did it — why did you let that happen to me?"_

_"Oh, I_ let _it happen to you, did I? Seeing as I wield foreseeing powers of whenever you're to make a fool of yourself?" Draco pauses. "Which is an unfortunate amount."_

_"You're an arsehole and a useless friend," Harry mumbles into his silken robes._

_"Yes, yes. Now come and dance with me, I'm bored. Diggory's clearly too busy eying your date," Draco says, grabbing his hand and pulling him along into the middle of waltzing pairs, grinning._

_He draws Harry to a stumbling stop there,_ _takes his hand and settles it at the middle of his own back. The other closing, under golden chandelier lights lit in their palms, over his._

_And there they dance for a long time, talking between easy twirls and gentle swaying, their laughter rising above the music._


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter deals a bit with jealousy and a depressive+dissociative-like response

By mid-April, Harry knows he's well and truly in love with Draco Malfoy.

It's a mundane moment, like any other, when he tells him that. The only difference is that they're walking down the High Street, having come out of Honeydukes with too many bags of sweets again, and when they come upon a space between two buildings, Harry pulls him into it by the wrist and up against the facade, just because he felt like kissing him again. He's not a romantic, and he knows that, but it's very easy to brush a kiss against his mouth in that moment, whisper into it, "I'm so in love with you."

Draco's hands are still raised around his packaged sweets, midway through being startled. The _u_ of Harry's hand is around one of his wrists. He's pink in the cheeks, surprised, until that falls away and his eyes crinkle with a smile. He's in love with Harry too. He's been in love with Harry for a long time. The fact of that takes the breath out of his lungs once more, burns at the base of his throat.

He's taking Harry's face in his hands, all cresent-moon dimples bracketing his smile, kissing him harder. "Took you only forever," Draco murmurs. He's looking at him that way again, that way that's always a bit overwhelming for his heart. He looks at Harry like he is all he can see right now, and nobody has ever looked at Harry with love like that, so blatant and sweet.

After, they go back to their designated alcove, where Harry holds Draco back against his chest, one leg pressed up against his side, Draco's hand on his leg. He watches him with a chin on his bony shoulder, trying to listen to his explanation on the applications of Shrivelfigs, but all he can pay attention to is his face, and his intelligent eyes moving fast and bright with thoughts, that he uses a lot of hand gestures. Harry kisses his cheek.

"Am I boring you?" Draco says, pressing his lips together with a look at him. He has to crane his head against his shoulder, arch an eyebrow, to be able to do that. "You're getting lost in some fantasy again, aren't you?"

Harry laughs. "No. Just you."

"You do know," Draco says. "That if you want to be a Healer, you have to focus, right? I mean, _truly_ focus? Not even being the Saviour of the Wizarding World can give you instant knowledge on anatomy or how to perform magical surgery."

"This isn't even related to that," Harry says, huffing. "How is learning about Shrivelfigs going to—"

"No, but it very much is related to your chances — " Draco stops, heaves a sigh and turns back to the book, adjusting it against his knees. "Salazar, who am I even talking to? They'd let you in even if you butcher your way through training."

Harry grins, takes the book up and out of his hands. "So now that we've established that," he says, teasingly making towards him for a kiss, but then the book is out of his hands again and shoved back against Harry's face.

"You don't need to, but I do," Draco says, raising his brow, putting the book back against his knees. Harry blinks, slightly ruffled, pushing his glasses back up his nose. They stare at each other. Draco's cheeks fold, tight, breaking into laughter. Harry huffs, laughing then too. Draco pulls him down, with a hand moving up to the back of his hair, into a kiss.

...

  
  


"Can I ask you something?" Potter says. They're lying together on Draco's bed, an arm around his waist. Longbottom is off to wherever he went, probably with Luna, just as Weasley is off with Granger, and Potter snuck in after a coin call. 

Draco hums in affirmation. His fingers brush over the line of his sternum, down to the tender space between his ribs.

Potter pauses, swallowing. He turns his head on the pillow. "How do you let me get so close…?"

Draco understands what that half-question has faded off into. _How do you trust me like that?_ Potter quiets upon seeing that, swallowing again. His fingers curl around his waist, thumb tracing over a marred, smooth line. He still hasn't seen them, what they all look like. Draco's body. He's only touched them during a heated kiss, a hand slipping under his shirt, laying warm over a meld of skin and too smooth tissue.

Draco looks up at him, shifting his jaw. There's too much to the answer of that question. There's not much that he can say of it, and Potter's staring back at him, waiting for it. Draco's vision focuses on brilliant green eyes, thick black lashes, and he is so very beautiful, the only thing still as bright and beautiful as his dreams—the dreams of whom kept Draco as sane as he still is, somehow, after everything.

"You're my comfort," is what he says.

_All my joy and good and comfort._

There isn't anything but for the stroke of a thumb over a slightly sensitive scar, and that brilliant gaze, moving down over Draco's face, back up to Draco's eyes. Potter's throat bobs.

Then he turns under the tangle of Draco's legs, his fingers curled loose on the soft between Potter's, his head lifting at the cue. Potter slides the other arm across his shoulderblades, pulling him close and rolling them over a little. He presses him down into the pillows, kisses him deep and unhurried.

Potter settles down beside him after a moment, pushing his nose over to Draco's hairline, murmuring, "And you're mine."

In the silence that follows, Draco thinks of his dreams again, of waking up that day in a hospital bed. Some days are bad enough that it's hard to be sure, that he won't just wake up somewhere else again, somewhere better, somewhere worse.

He remembers those dreams like he's lived them as fast as in days, even though he knows it didn't feel so when they were happening. There are certain memories that he still remembers with such clarity, down to the year and what he was wearing. It's the strangest thing, then, that he can't remember much of his actual childhood anymore, and much of this life has become a hazy assortment of time and memories by now. He remembers everything that happened to him in the war by the loom of a terrible memory or moment, a knowing of what was going to happen, that _had_ happened, but not much the memory or moment itself. Not in detail, anyhow, more in a blur of facts.

He distracts himself by a scar on Potter's arm, a long gash. He's seen it more than once, never asked about it. It feels like he can now. "Where did this come from?"

"The Basilisk," Potter says. He's told him the story, the Chamber of Secrets in second year, the diary that his father slipped into Ginny Weasley's books, the sword and Dumbledore's phoenix. He hasn't told him about this injury. There is another on the back of his hand, _I must not tell lies._ Draco's already guessed where that one could come from, having heard later on the disgusting truth of Umbridge's detentions. He's held that hand often, brushed a thumb over it.

"And the one here?" Draco says, circling a finger around a great lightning scar over the shirt of Potter's chest. He saw that in the boys showers, the first day. Everyone did. Potter came back with glamours all over the next day. He's smirking at him with a cocked eyebrow, apparently guessing just that. Draco rolls his eyes, pushing a hand flat all over his face. "Oh, so what!" Potter's laughing, shifting his head back onto the pillow. "It's not like I was the only one. Where did it come from? It looks just like this one." He brushes a thumb over Potter's temple, follows the jagged line where it cuts half-way into his brow.

"Forbidden Forest." Potter's hand is soothing and firm at his side. He licks his lips, turns his face away. Then, quietly, "I died there."

Potter's throat convulses, his eyes having gone hazy. It still haunts him, in some way, and that knowledge pulls taut in his chest, that he hasn't been safe, full of laughter and joy, all his life. That he was ever unloved and afraid and hurt, that he's eighteen and he had to save the world and lose too much as he did. That he _died_.

Potter's skin was smooth there, in his Dreams, just as Draco's had been, the two of them forever unmarred by the terrible things that had happened here, and his pain and empathy is a violent and alive rush through the nerves of his body. Awakening.

It's only when Potter's fingers touch his cheek that he feels the dampness of his own grief, the force of his own love mingled with it. He hears the tremor of his own breathing.

"Hey," Potter's whispering, drawing his face over his own with both hands, kissing his lips, their foreheads and noses together. Again, in a whisper, both hands pushing Draco's hair back tenderly behind his ears, "Hey."

Draco shakes his head, huffing at himself, muttering, "Nevermind, I— " Potter just pulls him in by the shoulders, holds him closer.

He doesn't notice his long sleeve has ridden up, until Potter's eyes have strayed, a frown twitching between his brows. It startles him a bit, when Potter's fingers push it down, trace over the jagged scars over his left forearm, edging around his Dark Mark, as if he thinks it will hurt Draco if he touches it.

"They did that to you?" he asks. Something in his voice is making it uneven, a rough rasp.

"No. Not… this was after," Draco says. He clears his throat. Potter has gone very quiet, eyes snapping up at him, his brows furrowed. "I don't know who it was. I was just… I was walking down Knockturn Alley. I didn't notice him coming. My mother had to… it's a big part of why she made me come back here."

There is a long silence after that, Potter pulling him back against him, rubbing circles over the soft skin of his wrist. He looks angry, his jaw set tight, and he doesn't speak, his body terribly tensed.

"Fucking bastard," Potter says, still with that rough, uneven rasp.

Draco huffs. "There isn't anything you can do about it now."

It's a long while after, when the movement of his chest steadies and his body finally relaxes slightly, that Potter speaks again.

"Do you ever talk about it all?" Potter asks. "With someone?"

"I do," Draco tells him, because he thinks it should ease some of the tension between Potter's brows. He does, with Luna, and with Madam Aileen, but it's terrifying, realising them into words said aloud. Inside his chest, they can be tucked away undisturbed into the hollow, the empty, the distance in his mind from those memories.

"You don't talk about it with me," Potter says, softly. "I mean, I'm… I'm glad you talk about it with anybody at all. I just—" His voice fades, but in it, he threads his fingers through Draco's, pulls it under his own cheek, seeming a bit softened by drowsiness. "You know. I'm here too."

Draco's jaw shifts, close-mouthed. Sometimes it's still hard not to feel small next to him, to feel like he's nothing more than a broken body in a hospital bed. Telling him anything about it feels like bringing himself back to that level to Potter.

But Potter has shown him all his scars, has told the story behind each one, has been vulnerable with him more than once, and maybe it should be easier to talk about his own now.

He told him everything there, in his dreams. There was nothing he felt he couldn't say to him there, but maybe that was also because it was never things like these. It was all the little things like an exhausting day, an annoying encounter, a funny and ridiculous interaction. It was never things like these.

Potter is watching him, face turned into the palm of Draco's hand. His glasses aren't on his face, and somehow the green of his eyes are always clearer and brighter without them, even in his dreams. And now here. He will always be the only thing as bright and beautiful as his dreams.

It feels a lot like freefalling, when Draco begins to speak, his voice only between the breadth of their faces apart. Potter's arms are a tight grip around him through that freefall, grounding and comforting. He just listens and holds him together all throughout.

…

One night, Potter draws him into a dance on the Quidditch pitch.

"You like this, don't you?" he says, pulling him by the hands a little away from the wireless playing a low song into the night, brilliant green eyes brighter with that sweet, crooked little grin as they stumbled a small step to a still, faces swaying too close. "Dancing? You said you did."

He's taking his hand in against his, palm to palm, fingers entwined together. His other hand is warm at the middle of his back. The wireless is singing on, left on the grass. Swaying their shoulders and waist, they turn in the small steps of a dance.

"What's got you in such a mood?" Draco asks, the edge of a laugh in his chest.

"Who," Potter says, smiling wider, kissing him. "I feel good," he says, in between, kissing the corner of his mouth, trails down his cheek and jaw and neck. "I just feel — you make me so — "

Draco laughs, catches his mouth in a kiss, quieting, stilling in the dance. There's only the low rise of a song into the vast space of the night, then, and the quiet sounds of the movement of their lips, and when it breaks, with their foreheads pressed together. 

Potter spins him under his arm, gently pulls him back into the circle of their dance, the two of them smiling, just two silhouettes in the dark. Somewhere underneath it all, Draco dreams, reliving, a hand closing over his in the daylight of a kitchen, a hand warm and gentle at the middle of his back, just like this, the two of them drawing him into the slow spin of a dance, just like this, and the sound of a wireless singing on, under the echo of laughter.

...

  
  


In May, Ginny comes back.

She throws herself in his arms in front of everybody on the Quidditch pitch.

They've always been together to the world, because nobody knew they ever broke up outside of those closest to Harry.

But Harry's eyes drift, in the midst of chaos and applause and wolf-whistles, to the boy he told weeks ago that he was in love with him.

Among the audience, Draco is standing there in the long distance between them, the most still thing in the chaos of the crowd, watching them with an unreadable expression.

Harry swallows. His heart is pounding in his throat, body sweat-soaked and hot from the match and now something else entirely — fear. He turns to look at Ginny again, stepping back. Her face is very close and her hands are on his chest, smiling up at him. He's hardly breathing, under the rise of the crowd's cheers and screams. She puts her forehead to his.

"Sorry I — I know this was a bit sudden, but I..." She laughs, seeming a bit high on her joy, their victory. "I missed you, and I can't stop thinking about you. I still... we have a long way to go, but I think we can make this work, Harry."

Harry knows he should say something. He knows he should tell her... he should tell her he's with somebody else. He should tell her he no longer feels—

Far off over her shoulder, there's Ron in all his Quidditch gear, flushed red and grinning. He's glancing at Angelina next to him as he says something to her, throwing the two of them a glance again.

And Harry ends up not saying much at all. 

He tells her after that he needs time to think about it, that there's stuff going on with him, because he doesn't know how to tell her anything. He doesn't know how to tell anyone anything that doesn't hurt. If he hurts Ginny, he hurts Ron, and he hurts everybody else he loves with that. If he doesn't tell them anything, if he doesn't tell her the truth, he hurts Draco.

Ginny understands, is kind and easy about it, and it only leaves him more ashamed. He walks away from her not knowing what to do with it, not knowing what to do. 

Harry doesn't see Draco the rest of the day, stuck at the celebrations for Gryffindor winning the Quidditch cup, but he's all he thinks about through it, and it's only in the dead of night, through a coin call, that they meet again on their Astronomy Tower. Draco's standing by the parapet, leaning into his elbows atop it. He must have heard his footsteps, because he's straightening, turning around, and Harry is moving towards him, a quick, desperate pace.

"Draco, fuck, I—" Harry's saying, touching his arms, stumbling in front of him. "I didn't know she was going to do that."

Draco's looking at him, his face the same as it was when he stood in the stands, carefully not giving anything away. "I know," he says. "I could tell."

Some of the tension, that's been following Harry all through the day, drains from his body. Still, his heart feels tight in his chest, his head aching as if it's split in two directions.

"I…" Harry says, exhales a shuddering breath. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be," Draco says. He leans forward onto the parapet again. Harry, too, does that, hanging his head down between his shoulders. He doesn't look down below, hasn't been able to all through the school year. "But what are you going to do about it?"

"I told her I need time," Harry says. He doesn't look at him when he does. He knows it's the wrong thing to say.

Draco doesn't say anything either for a long moment. "You need time," he repeats, then, quietly. "That's what you told her."

"She's still in love with me," Harry says. He swallows, straightens, looking down at the grip of his hands around the parapet.

"But you're not in love with her anymore, are you," Draco says. 

Harry lifts his eyes to him. "No, of course not. Why would you even — I'm in love with you." He can see the look on Draco's face. It's impassive, indecipherable, but it has a clear meaning _._ He turns away, breathes, rubs at his eyes. "Look, I… I'll tell her I don't… feel that way for her anymore. I will. I just…"

Draco waits, and when there's nothing, he says, "Just what?"

There is a very long silence.

"I'm just afraid," Harry says, in a low voice. "They're still… there's still so much that's just wrong, and I'm afraid that if I hurt her now, I'll lose her, and then I'll lose Ron, and then I'll lose everybody…"

"You must not have a lot of faith in them, then," Draco says, coolly. "Even after they've gone through a war with you."

"It's not like that," Harry says. He doesn't know how to explain what it is that's keeping him from telling Ginny, and Ron, the strange fear and anxiety that he might just be on the verge of losing everything. "I don't know."

"Is it because of me?" Draco says. His throat convulses, and that is the only sign of his emotions, staring ahead at the open expanse of foliage and the starry sky. "That you're afraid?"

Harry looks at him, brows furrowed. "No, God no, Draco, I — I want to tell them about you," he says. He doesn't know how to tell him that it's not because it's him, not really. It's Harry, thinking of being locked inside of a cupboard, and how lonely and cold it was. He thinks about losing Ginny and Ron and the Weasleys and it feels a lot like that again. He wants to say, _I need time._ But he's being a coward, and he knows it. 

  
  
  


...

  
  


"Do you know how the potion works? The one that Malfoy was given?" Hermione asks him, the next day, in the fall of a silence. They're sitting in the library, where she was tutoring him on Transfiguration theories five minutes ago, and then gave him some questions to practice on.

"A bit," Harry says, scribbling over his parchment, pausing, crossing out an accidentally repeated word. "Why?"

"It's just... it's interesting. I've been reading up on it." There's something strange about the way she sounds, her voice light and careful. Harry looks up at her. There's something strange about the way she's holding herself as well. "I've read that the person the user craves is the one that features most in the dreams. And, more often than not, if there's a romantic one, then it's that person mostly. Not always. I suppose it depends on the person, and what they value most, but for loads of people, it'd be that person they'd spend a good part of their lives with."

Harry's mind snags onto the last part of that. It skips over him with no meaning. "A good part of their lives…?"

Hermione seems to understand what his confusion is about. "Time perception is skewed greatly in those dreams, you know. What's months here would be decades in the dream. It's a lot like... living another life."

The world screeches to a halt, his mind slamming against the understanding. Harry can't move, or breathe, or think. He feels a bit lightheaded from the way the air is no longer reaching his lungs fully. He swallows, blinks quickly, feeling like there's too much his mind is trying to take in, and yet taking in nothing at all.

"Why—" His voice is shallow, thick, a little breathless. "Why are you telling me all of this?"

Hermione looks down, at her lap under the table. "You know why, Harry," she says, when she looks up at him again. "What you're doing with him — _to_ him — it can't end well."

"You know." It's about all he can muster right now. His brain feels stretched taut, blank.

"It's hard to miss," she says, softly.

  
  
  


...

  
  


That night, Draco finds him at the Astronomy Tower again. Potter is sitting there in the corner, head in his hands. He raises his head only at the scuff of his feet.

"Draco," Potter says, his voice soft, straightening. There's something different in the way he's looking at Draco, a little bloodshot-tired and overwhelmed, like he's been thinking too much. He looks awful.

Draco comes to sit beside him against the wall, pulling his knees up, pressing his shoulder against Potter's. After a few seconds, he asks, "Something happened?"

Potter swallows. He looks at him, or tries to, only he can't seem to do it fully.

Draco tries to gauge his expression, his body language. He leans a bit closer, tilting his head to try and get a look at him. "What?"

There is a very long silence.

"I know," Potter says, quietly. This time, when he looks at Draco, he does so fully. His face seems to grow years older with the words. "Draco, I know."

Draco's insides go cold.

There is one thing, only, that comes to mind, that he never believed Potter would ever know, could never know. He tells himself it cannot possibly be that.

"About the dreams," Potter says, then, and Draco's hands go numb, his heart jolting painfully, kicking up towards a violent storm. "You dreamed of me."

Draco can't speak, can only stare at him. His brows scrunch together, his lips parted in uncertainty.

"You... how do you know that?"

"You dreamed of a life with me," Potter whispers. 

Draco's breaths are shallowing in his chest as he stares at him. He blinks, finally, a quiver running through his face. He keeps himself still, but for a convulsion of his throat.

"I'm not expecting anything of you," he says, only he is, and he knows he is. He knows what he's always looking for, in every moment of his life here, in every little thing Potter does. He's always looking for his dreams, for his Harry.

"I don't think I know how to… how to wrap my head around this," Potter says.

"You don't have to," Draco says, an edge of desperation to his words. He hardly knows what he's saying, just saying whatever he thinks Potter would want to hear. "It happened. It's over. You don't have to do anything about — _"_

"It's terrifying sometimes, the way you... " Potter's voice is thick and breathy in the high wind of the tower, like he has a cold. He laughs, shaky, and more than anything, he just sounds terrified, and this is everything Draco has been terrified of himself, unfolding right before his eyes. "There's this way that you look at me, like you... and I didn't understand it before, but I understand it now... _"_

Draco sets his jaw. There is a tight, swooping feeling in his chest. He holds himself still and careful, controlled. He blinks, a bit fast. "What, do I look at you like I like being with you? So sorry. How terrible of me."

Potter looks at him, wordless. He looks tired. "You know there's a lot more to it than that. You..." He seems to struggle for words. He settles on, "You look at me like you live for me." He stops, huffing, looking away. "Merlin fuck. I hate how that came out."

Draco laughs, derisive, and stands up. He hates that he isn't wrong, that he was able to read that at all. He rubs his hands down his face, his back to Harry, trying to gain some composure. He turns only when he thinks he can speak again, and when he does, his voice wavers only slightly, "And is that so bad? Is that so fucking bad after — after _everything_? That you make me want to be here in this godforsaken world where nothing ever feels right anymore?"

"No, it's," Potter says, a little like he's trying to pacify him. "It's not, but it's just... it's overwhelming, okay? It's hard and overwhelming and _terrifying_ to imagine you dreaming of living an entire fucking _life_ with me and I know _nothing_ about it! And I can't... I feel like I don't know what I'm trying to live up to."

"I'm not..." Draco stops, tries to breathe but air isn't quite coming to him, and he wants to tell him he's not hoping for anything, or expecting anything of him, but the words get stuck in his throat. He just feels desperate, and like he wants to run, or go back somewhere this never would have had to happen. "What the hell am I supposed to do then? I don't have anything anymore. There is _nothing_ in this damned fucking world that makes me feel a damned fucking thing anymore except you! What am I supposed to do?"

Potter stands up, and makes his way over, taking his face in his feather-light hands.

"Draco," he whispers, in that tender way he often did now, a voice reserved for him. Draco listens only for that, stilled, his chest heaving slightly. His breathing is still a bit heavy. "I'm sorry."

Draco blinks hard at the sting in his eyes, a tension around his jaw, and there is still that tight, swooping feeling in his chest.

"I just wish," Potter says, softly. "I don't want you to keep living in those dreams, you know… they weren't real. They weren't… they were just dreams."

There is a lurch in Draco's chest, and he's tearing himself away from Potter, staring at him and feeling strangely betrayed and hurt by the words. "Don't say that to me." _Not you._

"Draco… come on."

"So what? Do you want to leave me now, is that it? Had enough of the Death-Eater boy, and now you want to go back to your Weasel girl?"

Potter's eyes clench shut. "Don't. Don't do that."

"You can't force yourself to be with her," Draco says, coldly.

"I don't want to—"

"You'll just make yourself miserable, and you're a coward if you can't tell her you don't want her to her face. You're a coward for letting those Weasleys dictate anything of your life.

Potter's throat shifts, and he looks like he's trying to reign in his anger, not say something unkind. 

"Maybe," Potter says, opening his eyes, meeting Draco's. His voice is level and low. "There are some things you need to ask yourself. Like, is it me that you're in love with? Or is it just some dream of me?"

He may just have chosen to say the worst one anyway.

Draco clenches his jaw. It quivers around his mouth anyway. "Fuck you."

"You won't even say my name," Potter says, quietly. 

It comes as a jolt to him. Draco's face falls, unable to gather it back up. Potter looks away from it.

"That's why you... I didn't understand why you were so careful about that. I told myself it didn't matter. Maybe you just felt strange... but that's why you haven't called me by anything since we got together." Potter swallows hard. He looks up to his eyes again, seems to do with some effort. "You won't call me Harry because Harry is somebody else now, and you're too scared to let me be him, because..." His voice falters a bit. Even then, his face is carefully still, even though his eyes are red-rimmed. "because what if I'm just too disappointing for you."

Potter waits for him to say something only for a few seconds. There's nothing. With that, he walks past him towards the exit, Draco left behind to stare at nothing, lips parting around a protest that he didn't have the voice for.

...

* * *

_Harry, please._

* * *

...

  
  


Draco stares at the box full of letters. He has a quill in hand. There's a parchment in front of him. There are things he wants to say, that he can't say to Harry, to Potter.

_Is it me you're in love with? Or is it just some dream of me?_

_You won't even say my name._

_You won't call me Harry because Harry is somebody else now, and you're too scared to let me be him._

He doesn't realise what he's done until the box is sideways on the floor, and there's an unsteady line of ink staining the floor and some of the letters strewn about all over. There's the sound of an angry cry still ringing in his mind, his own. His hand is trembling, curling into a fist atop the desk.

After a long time of gathering his composure, Draco spells them all back into the box, casts a _Scourgify_ on the ink, faded blue stains still left behind, and then repairs the shattered bottle. He puts the box under his bed, charmed to disintegrate if anybody other than him ever touches it. He stands up from his chair, abrupt, grabs his coat on his way out of the room.

It is at the Great Lake that he sees them. Potter, standing uncertainly by a tree, Ginevra taking his hand in her own, stepping a bit closer to him. Potter's eyes lift on her, brows twitching into a frown. Draco's heart is twisted ugly, on fire, and he turns around, doesn't look back.  
  
  


...

_"Sometimes I feel like," Draco says_ _. "Sometimes I feel like we're not real."_

_Harry blinks, a little bemused. "What do you mean?" He touches Draco's thigh, and then pinches it hard. Draco yelps, shoves back at his face with a full hand in retaliation. Harry laughs, shifting his head back onto the pillow, his hair a wild mess. He takes a hold of Draco's hand, rubs a thumb over his knuckles. "Alright, alright. Sorry. Tell me."_

_"I mean… I don't know how to explain it. It's just… it's a very faint sense, only for a few seconds, but it feels a bit like… like I'm watching us from another world, and I feel..." He doesn't know what the word for it is, how to put it into something understandable. It feels strange, off-kilter, a little like too good to be true. "I don't know. Like I can't… believe it."_

_It doesn't seem to make much sense to Harry. Draco doesn't think it makes much sense to himself either. It's such an unclear, muddled feeling, but he's noticed it, more than once, like one might feel a sense of deja vu for the briefest moment, only this is something entirely different. "Like you can't believe…?"_

_"Anything, I suppose. Us. That everything is so good, and perfect."_

_"Well," Harry says, smiling. "I think we'd be good and perfect in every world."_

_He brings Draco's hand up to his lips, kisses the pad of every finger. Draco smiles back, softly, brushing them over Harry's lips._

  
  
  


...

  
  


"There's a lot on your mind today, isn't there?" Luna says, her head tilted. "I can see a lot of Wrackspurts around your head."

Draco stares at her, and it takes a few seconds to latch on to what she's said. His head feels full, even though his thoughts are foggy and slow. He's been thinking a lot these days. He's been thinking a lot about a cellar, and his dreams, and about Harry, about Potter. More than anything these days, Potter. He's been going away a lot.

"Would you like to tell me what's on your mind?" Luna asks.

"Sorry, I'm..." His voice is too raspy. He clears his throat, and begins to stand to his feet. "I think I may be coming down with... Excuse me."

"I don't want you to go," she says, a frown on her face. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. We can just sit here and not speak if you'd like."

Draco sits back down slowly, after a moment.

Luna ties the ribbons of her magic around his hand.

Draco's brows furrow, doleful. He opens his mouth, but his voice has gone, and no words come. 

They stare out at the distant Shrieking Shack together, for a long time. He feels hollow, and he thinks he's going away, coming back, and he doesn't know how long they sit there silent, until Draco's eyes sting in the cool breeze. She stays right beside him on the bench with her legs kicking slightly, holding his hand with her magic and facing ahead to watch two kids push each other, laughing, and then a bit later, a couple kissing under a tree.

Luna is still here when he has to set his jaw hard against the tremors moving down to his is hands and shoulders, against the burn making his face and eyes warm. She is still here when his breaths hitch dangerously, when he begins to dry heave sobs.

"May I hold you?" Luna asks him, and Draco just hardly manages to nod through it all.

She leans her head against the shoulder of his robes, her white-blond hair nestling against him, her arm curling around his bicep. The threads of magic dissipate, and in its place, she takes his hand in her own, warm and grounding.

 _I'm just afraid_ , Potter said.

Draco didn't understand this before. He understands it now. He is just one person, hardly enough to fill a lifelong void. He loves Potter like he might die without him, but Potter has more than enough to live without him.

He's always been a cruel and selfish boy, and that cruel and selfish boy in him wants to be chosen above all, but he's also been a person that cares about somebody else more than himself. He can be that person again.

And maybe, the worst thing is that Potter is not wrong.

Maybe he is just in love with a dream now, more than anything, and Potter deserves better than somebody that can't wake up. 

He won't be a choice Potter will make and regret, and he won't wait for Potter to make his choice and realise that Draco is hardly a choice at all. If it means that he will burn one way or the other, then he will not stay to become ashes and watch the fire die out.

_They were just dreams._

Draco may struggle to tell dreams apart from reality, but he knows well the fine line between them.

...

* * *

_And maybe in the_ _end,_ _I'll always need you more than you need me._

* * *

...

When Harry knocks at the door of Draco's dorm one morning, it's Neville who answers. "Harry," he says, seeming a little surprised by him here. He knows who Harry usually knocks on these doors for. "Hello."

He and Draco haven't talked in days. Harry thought he would go to him when they were both feeling a bit calmer, though Harry doesn't think he's entirely calm about everything yet. There is still a lot that he needs to wrap his head around, and he thinks it might take him a lot longer to, but he hasn't talked to Draco since that night on the Astronomy Tower. The guilt sank in deeper the longer he ruminated over what he said, tried to understand better how Draco must be really feeling.

Harry shakes his head slightly. Neville is waiting for him to say something. He smiles a bit, though it comes too strange on his face. "Hello, um." He feels a bit nervous. He puts his hands into his pockets. "I was just… is... is Draco in there right now?" 

Neville's expression clears, and then it just becomes bemused.

"I…" Neville's mouth opens. "He didn't tell you?"

That is when the strange feeling starts, low in his chest. "Tell me what?"

"He's gone, Harry."

Harry's brain hits a barricade, goes blank. He's just staring at Neville, his brows twitching.

"Gone?" he manages. His throat has gone tight. "Gone where?"

"He... he left," Neville says. He seems to be realising what's gone on, looking distressed about it. "I'm sorry, Harry. I thought he would have... he came in packing everything, not saying anything. I tried to ask him why...and I don't know, I guess he arranged for a train back to the King's Cross Station or something, which should be leaving around now..."

Harry doesn't wait to listen to the rest of it. He just turns around and runs. He runs out the commons, down all the stairs to the third floor corridor, towards the one-eyed witch with the secret passage that opened into Honeydukes.

He's entirely breathless and sweaty, his heart pounding terribly, by the time he's turning into the crack of an Apparition and landing where the anti-Apparition wards started, by the time he's running the rest of the way to the Hogsmeade station. Far in the distance, the train is a mere pin-point. He's breathing heavy and hard, folded at the abdomen with heaves for air, a hand on a pillar. Draco is in that train, and he is leaving Harry behind, going Merlin knows where, all without even a word to him.

Harry has nothing, no way to reach that train. He didn't bring a broom. He can't Apparate in these warded areas. He can't breathe even as he's pulling desperately for it, his body gone numb, and he's just standing there, watching a train take away the boy he loves, disappearing completely to the eye.

…

He makes a hazy walk back to his own dorm. The entire commons is emptied of people by now, who have all gone to the Great Hall. Neville is the only one there, waiting for him.

"Are you okay?" Neville asks.

Harry's mouth works around the answer. "Yeah. I just want to... be alone, if you don't mind. You should go on."

Neville stares at him, and nods, arms folded over his chest. He looks down at his shoes, away. "Yeah. Okay. I'll… I'll come back, yeah? To check on you."

"Thanks," Harry says. Neville pushes himself off the doorframe, and then leaves. Harry goes into his own room, sits down by the bed on the floor. 

In his trunk, left slightly open for its mass of contents, he can see all the drawings and notes he's collected over the months in the furthest corner. He picks up one. It says, _the alcove after your Quidditch practice?_ Next to it is that bizarrely dressed portrait at their alcove, that they often made fun of. The man is standing in front of the mirror, but he is blowing kisses out at Harry instead of himself. It had been so absurd, and Harry had laughed seeing it just before their Charms class, Draco turned a little towards him in the next row two seats ahead, a quill between his fingers, smirking.

Harry places it back on the trunk, slowly, and falls back against the wall, putting his wrists to his knees, loosely pulled up.

 _The NEWTs are in two weeks_ , is what he thinks first, and wants to laugh in a bout of hysteria, because then he thinks of how serious Draco used to be when it came to both their grades.

And he's the one that left two weeks before what he's always called _the most important examinations of your life, for Merlin's sake._

He doesn't know how long he sits there, numbed, and when his eyes grow blurry. His body is feeling his grief before he is, because his chest is just hollow. 

Where did he go?

Why did he leave, just like that?

The door opens, creaking ajar. He doesn't look up to see who it is.

"Oh, Harry." It's Hermione. She's settling against his side, pulling him against her shoulder. There's a part of him that wants to be angry at her, for telling him what she did, for throwing that in, but he's tired and empty and heartbroken and even now he understands that she was seeing what he didn't, that she was thinking about Draco too in some way, and he can't fault her for that. She strokes his hair. "I'm sorry," she whispers.

"He's gone," Harry says, his voice thick. "He... he just _left,_ he didn't even..."

"I'm so sorry," Hermione whispers again, like it's all she knows how to say.

  
  


…

  
  


Later that day, Neville knocks at his door. He's come with a box in his hands.

"I, um… I found this under Draco's bed. Think these are for you. I didn't read anything. Just saw your name on one of them." He holds it out to Harry. "And I just thought you should…"

Harry takes it from him, staring down at it blankly for a few seconds.

"Thank you," he says, hoarsely. Neville nods at him.

When Neville is gone, Harry opens the box.

 _Letters to my beautiful boy,_ is written at the very top page, in a pretty calligraphy.

Harry closes the box quickly, closing his eyes, putting the back of a hand to his quivering mouth. He opens his trunk and fits it inside with all his things and the drawings and the notes.

He doesn't open it for a long time.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for one line that deals with passive suicidal ideation, allusions to Draco's past abuse in one letter

Harry gets back together with Ginny after the NEWTs have come and gone, and breaks up with her three days later.

"It feels like you're never really _here,_ " Ginny says. She's lying down on her back and staring up at the ceiling, Harry sat on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing. They were kissing, but his heart wasn't in it, and she noticed. "Like your mind's always somewhere else."

She doesn't know anything about what transpired in the months they weren't together. He's been trying to move on with her these past few days, trying to remember everything he once loved about her, so he could feel what he felt for her back then. 

"Something to do with Malfoy?" she then says. "I know he was your friend, and then I guess something happened and he left, and you've just been gone ever since."

"I don't think…" Harry says, hoarse. He looks down at his hands. "Gin, I don't think we should be together anymore."

"You're not in love with me," Ginny says, a statement rather than a question.

Harry swallows hard. His brows twitch into a frown. "I'm sorry."

Ginny is silent for a long moment. "It hasn't really been working these days, has it?"

Harry doesn't say anything.

"It hasn't really been working for a long time," Ginny says, quieter.

The bed moves slightly as she sits up. The sheets rustle, and her clothes, as she buttons her shirt up. Then she scoots forward to sit beside him on the edge of the bed, hands planted onto it, shoulders a little high.

"I don't know what happened," Harry says, softly. He doesn't know _when_ it happened, when his love for her became nothing more than what it was when she was eleven and he was twelve. Was it the war that changed them? Was it the distance between them during the time he went hunting Horcruxes?

"A lot happened," Ginny says.

A lot did happen.

A lot happened, and then Draco happened.

Ginny's hands fold on her lap. Her red hair is getting in the way of her face. "I think I just came back because… I was afraid that I was making the wrong choice, and taking too long, and I'll regret not coming back to you before you stopped wanting me." She looks up at him. "I guess I'm sure now, that there's… this is it, then. Isn't it?"

"Yeah, I...I guess so," Harry says. He's tracing a thumb over the scar on the back of his hand, remembers the way Draco used to brush his thumb over it. He feels it now, like a phantom touch. He's thinking, vaguely, about that day he told Draco about every one of his scars.

They sit together for a long moment, and then Ginny stands, slowly, gathering her things, her jacket.

"Ginny," Harry says, when she's at the door. 

Ginny stops, turning around to face him. Her jacket is on her arm.

"I fell in love with him."

He's been feeling like a liar, trying to love her, knowing he loved somebody else. He feels like he's told her the truth now.

 _You can't force yourself to be with her_ , Draco said that day. _You'll just make yourself miserable._

"Oh." There is a long silence. A long, long silence. He thinks this is where he really hurt her. He doesn't look behind him. He doesn't know how she feels about the fact that it had been another boy and not another girl. He doesn't know if it matters to her. His heart is racing, thick in his throat, and the silence goes on so long he thinks she's gone, until she says, "Were… were you together?"

"I'm sorry," Harry whispers.

"And you still got with me," Ginny says. "You… you knew you were in love with… with him, and you were _with_ him, and you still got with me."

"I know, I was wrong, it was a shitty thing to do and I—"

"Damn right it was a shitty thing to do, Harry," Ginny hisses. "Did you think I'd rather you do _this_ than just tell the truth to my face?"

"I don't know what I was thinking," Harry says, desperate, hands rubbing his eyes. "I don't… I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me."

Ginny slams the door shut on her way out. Harry feels sick to his stomach, sick with himself all the time, and like he might just lose everything after all. He lost Draco because he was too afraid of just that, and now he might just lose everything anyway.

  
  


...

  
  


Ron is angry. He doesn't talk to Harry for weeks, coming close to a whole month. He knows he hurt Ginny, broke her heart. He did the wrong thing trying to fall back in love with her when he knew he couldn't, and he deserves their cold shoulder. He is still terrified of losing him and everybody else he loved. He is still fucked up over losing Draco. He is terrified of not ever talking to them, terrified of going over first only to learn he was no longer welcome or a part of their family. So he keeps himself isolated in Grimmauld Place, with only Hermione and Luna visiting him for company.

It's three weeks later that Molly visits him. She doesn't say much at the fireplace. He quickly scrambles up in his surprise, stood by the couch. She comes forward, with a wrinkled smile, hugging him wordlessly, and she eats lunch with him, and updates him about George's shop and Ginny applying for Quidditch teams and helping Ron and Hermione with their apartment and Arthur's job.

"You really hurt her," Molly says. "Ginny."

"I know," Harry says. He can't look up from the table. He swallows. "I'm so sorry."

"Come to dinner," Molly says. "Tell her that."

"I did tell her," Harry says.

"Tell her again. She won't forgive you right away, but talk to her properly at least once."

When she leaves, she does so with a kiss to his forehead and a pat to his cheek.

He goes to dinner with his heart racing that night. Ron leaves right as he sees him there, which leaves him sunken inside.

He asks for a moment with Ginny aside, right as she was about to leave, and apologises to her. She's still clearly angry and hurt, standing there with her arms folded around herself, but she turns around and gestures him to follow her. There, they talk about it in her old room, all of it, and they both cry a bit, but by the end of it, they're a bit lighter, laughing a little together over her old Quidditch player posters still stuck to her walls.

A week later, Ron follows.

"She told me I need to stop making her problems and feelings my responsibility," he's saying. He's brought Molly's muffins as a treat, ate them with him on Harry's bed. "She...well, you know she's always hated how overprotective I got about her. She thinks it's because I think she can't take care of herself. It's not like that though, it's just... she's my little sister, you know? I can't stand her getting hurt. But I'm… good with not having to... I don't want to choose between my sister and my best friend. So...sort it out, you two."

"Yeah," Harry says. "We... we did talk about it."

"And?"

"She needs a bit more time to really, truly forgive me." Harry pulls a bit at the muffin wrap, idly. "But I think we'll be alright."

Ron nods, slowly. "Alright. That's... that's good."

They fall into silence.

"She didn't tell me who you were with," Ron says. "Just that you were in love with somebody else."

Harry swallows, frowning. The love he felt mingled with shame, a complicated ball of emotions. He feels it for Ginny, who respected him and protected him even after what he did. He feels it for the boy he loved, still loves, that he hurt so terribly that he left everything behind.

He was angry at first. He was so angry, over the layer of his hurt and grief, that Draco just left like that. That he _ran,_ at the first sign of trouble between them. He was angry enough to tell himself they clearly wouldn't have worked out anyway, then.

But then he thinks about the way Draco used to look at him, with all the love of decades of a dream, like he had that day he kissed him goodbye next to a hospital bed, and then all the time after they got together. He thinks about how he's loved him in ways Harry hasn't quite caught up to yet, sometimes wonders if he ever will now. And he thinks he understands. It's terrifying, to have somebody look at him like that, feel that way about him, but he understands why he left to keep himself safe. 

"You don't have to tell me, I suppose," Ron says. Harry's been quiet too long. "I mean. Not until you're ready. So I'll just, you know. I have to go back and paint some walls. You'll be alright?"

"Yeah. I'll be fine."

Ron nods, claps a heavy hand down on his shoulder, mouth squinching into a sort of smile. He stands up, making for the door.

And maybe Harry will really lose him now. He's already lost Draco, and maybe he loses Ron now too, but he wants to say it. As if he is making up for something. As if he is, somehow, choosing Draco now by telling them all, because he realises now he should have taken that risk. He realises now that he loves him more than he is afraid of anything, but now he is gone and all he has are his letters and his drawings and a coin that won't talk back to him, and nothing ever feels right anymore.

He has always struggled to feel it. Being loved. But with Draco, the way he loved Harry, there was never any doubt, because he loved him so openly and tenderly that Harry had no choice but to feel it.

And he let him go, just like that.

And maybe now Harry wonders if he only loved those dreams of him, but...

But Harry still loves him, and he wants him back so much it leaves him sick and aching most days. 

"Ron?"

Ron turns at the door, looking at him.

"I love him." 

For a moment, there's nothing. Ron just stares at him, unreadable. He doesn't seem surprised, or confused about who he is talking about, just a bit like he's got confirmation of something he wondered, didn't quite believe yet.

"Yeah. Okay," Ron says. He nods, turns his head into the part of the door. He looks a bit like he doesn't really know what to say. Harry looks down at his hands, wide and fixated. "Um. Okay."

There's just silence. Harry thinks he might have left.

"It's okay if you like blokes, you know," Ron says. "If you felt...feel that way for... Malfoy. I was just angry because you hurt Gin, and you need to seriously make it up to her for that. But there is nothing in the world, _nothing_ in the world that would ever..." He doesn't finish it, but Harry's face is already twisting, and Ron is coming back inside, closing the door. He's crossing the room and settling back beside him, hugging him by the shoulders. 

He composes himself again a moment later. Ron's hand is rubbing up and down his back.

"Did you think I was that much of an arsehole?" Ron asks after, moving back, huffing a bit ruefully.

"No," Harry says, shaking his head. He scrubs his hands down his face. "Sorry. I don't... I don't know what I was thinking."

"It's okay," Ron says. "I know I get a bit hotheaded sometimes, but. You know. You're my best mate. I wouldn't have just..."

"You're the only family I've ever had," Harry says, a bit thickly. "You and your family."

Ron eyes him for a moment, as if making sense of something. "Our family," he says. "And one day you should give me your stupid relatives' new fellytone number, so I can bloody scream their ears off again."

Harry laughs, only the slightest of a tremor. "It's telephone."

Ron waves a hand, his lips twitching into a smile. "Ah. You know what I mean."

"I'm sure they suffered enough the first time," Harry says, smiling back slightly. 

"I don't think they did," Ron says, quite seriously.

...

Harry opens the box of letters almost two months after, and spends an entire night reading every single letter with careful attention, his heart a painful throb up to his throat.

_I want to, you know. I want to call you by your name. But you've only ever been Harry where you were mine and I just can't_

_You won't even say my name_ , Harry said to him, that day he last saw him. He wonders what it means that Draco still wasn't able to call him by name, even after. Had it meant he didn't feel like Harry was his, then? That he didn't love him enough? Had it meant that Harry, here, wasn't enough? 

He closes his eyes, his heart stretching taut, aching. He tries not to think about it.

_How can I ever forget you?_

This one doesn't entirely make sense to Harry. There is no date. 

_I sometimes think you're all I live for. I lived one life living for you and now it's all I know._

_You are the only good thing in my life, and fuck it all, I'm going to keep you for as long as I can_

They're just short letters at first, or they're two lines of a thought, or they're three lines of something he has never said to Harry, or they're something as simple as a dated _you make me happy_ or an _I love you._

_I haven't loved you for seven years. I have loved you for seventy._

Harry's hand shakes. He swallows hard, puts it away on the growing stack of already-read notes. He doesn't pick up another for the rest of the night.

...

* * *

_Harry,_

_Do you remember that day at the Manor?_

_You wouldn't know what happened after you left. They took me away again. They made my mother let me go so they could take me away and put me back there again._

_And I remember I begged Severus to give me that potion, because after everything that happened that day, all I wanted was to get back to you, wake up next to you instead of there in that filthy cellar._

_Did you know that you woke me up? I think you must know by now._

_Did you know that the only reason I came out sane at all, and survived it all, was because I was happy somewhere else with you?_

_Love,_

_Draco_

* * *

...

There are nights when Harry takes the coin out again, places it by his lips, and whispers to Draco everything he can't tell him anymore.

"I hope you're safe, and you're okay."

"I'm sorry."

"I miss you."

"I think it took me a while to understand what it was that I said, but I get it now, you know. They weren't just dreams. They were real to you, and they helped you survive."

"Come back, and we'll fix it."

…

* * *

_Harry,_

_I used to daydream about you long before that damned potion ever got to me, did you know. Before I even knew who you were._

_Sometimes I get so angry and I think, my entire life must have been wasted on you, and maybe now it will always be wasted on you._

_That day, when I kissed you goodbye — I told myself I wouldn't ever think about you again, or I'd forget you some day, even if that meant I'd spent my entire life trying._

_I don't really know what I'm trying to say. I don't know what I'm supposed to do now here. I guess I just keep thinking I've already lived one life. I don't need to live another, do I?_

_Love,_

_Draco_

* * *

...

Harry's been searching for Draco, down to tracking the connection by the Galleon, only to find it was disintegrated somewhere in Wiltshire. 

It's three months after that Harry feels daring enough to visit Narcissa Malfoy.

Narcissa is still as kind and fond of him as she was before, greeting him with an embrace and a kiss to his cheek, so Harry doesn't know if she's aware of what happened between him and Draco. She sits him down for tea.

"I think I may know what you're here for, Harry," is what she says after the pleasantries, the lapse into silence. "I'm afraid I can't give it to you."

"I just want to speak to him," Harry says. "He hasn't been receiving my owls." They keep coming back unopened.

"He's warded against all owls but mine and official ones," Narcissa says.

"I just want to know where he is. If he's okay."

Narcissa scrutinises him for a few seconds, then she leans forward to put her cup down on the table, sits back with her hands folded on her knee. Her legs are crossed, all grace and elegance. "I am deeply indebted to you, Harry, and I understand you can invoke this debt, but I see you as better than that." Harry contemplates, for a second, if he isn't more desperate than he is better. But it will be a terribly low thing to do, and if he is to find Draco, then it must be by any other means. "He's promised to owl me everyday now. I cannot jeopardize his trust and risk this availability."

"Could you owl to him, then? Tell him I'm looking for him?"

"He doesn't want to be found." She smiles, contrite and rueful.

"Will you at least tell him I'm sorry?"

"For reasons I cannot mention, I'm not inclined to mention you at all to him. Don't take this wrongly, Harry. I do care for you, but he is my son first and foremost. And I'm afraid you will have to find him through other means."

"He's told you."

"He has."

_Will you tell him I love him?_

"I understand. I'll… I'll leave now. Thank you for your time, Narcissa."

Harry continues to visit Narcissa often, to ask for news on Draco and her welfare, though he doesn't opt for staying long. He is still uncertain if Narcissa's amicable demeanour is mere debt, if she dislikes him in some way in her heart.

"He's found some friends," she says. "He's currently staying with them, and seeking help with their aid."

Harry is desperately, painfully relieved to hear that, that he has people there around him, that he's safe and getting better and not alone. He wants to ask who the friends are, but he thinks Narcissa won't answer that. There is a lot she doesn't answer, to protect Draco's whereabouts.

On another day, he asks her, "how do you live here all alone, like this?"

She smiles, bordering on wry. "Would you believe I'm only living for my son's letters and your visits?"

Harry visits her more often after that, and stays much longer.

  
  


...

* * *

_Harry,_

_Do you remember how we met?_

_I remember seeing you walk into the robe shop, thinking you were the most beautiful I had ever seen. I did everything right this time. I didn't say anything stupid about your friends and I asked you for your name and I told you mine. The day we left for Hogwarts, I looked for you on the train, found you sitting by yourself in your compartment, and I took you by the hand and pulled you into mine, and I spent the entire train ride desperately trying to make you laugh. Merlin, it seems all I ever wanted to do was make you laugh._

_You and I, we weren't enemies. We were meant to be. I didn't spend seven years hating you, wishing you'd fallen in love with me too._

_I wish you remembered that too._

_Salazar, I must sound mad. I keep trying to tell myself you'll never feel that way, that they were just dreams, but they were the realest things I've ever felt._

_And now I'm awake, and I'm the only one that's lived that life with you, and I don't know what to do._

_Love,_

_Draco_

* * *

...

"Do you ever hate me" Hermione asks, tentatively. "For... what I told you?"

Harry gets angry at a lot of things. He can't lie that some bad days, he gets angry at her too, for telling him that, for not letting them be in their blissful ignorance. Draco would never have left then, maybe, if he wasn't so scared of what Harry learned, of what he knew now, and Harry would never have days where he got doubtful and sad that it wasn't really him that Draco wanted.

"I don't hate you," Harry says. "But honestly, sometimes, I wish you never said anything."

More than anything, he gets angry at himself. More than anything, he contemplates the ten other things he could have done in that moment — kept himself in check, not said those things, acted like he was fine, like he wasn't terrified and overwhelmed by it himself. Maybe he should have acted like he didn't know anything at all. Done anything that would have made Draco stay.

But then he thinks that maybe it wouldn't have worked, that it would have festered in him until he couldn't breathe, and he broke.

He knows when Hermione told them, she was thinking of both of them, even Draco, in some way.

"I want him back," Harry whispers. "I want him to come back."

Hermione's lips twitch, rueful.

...

* * *

_Harry,_

_Do you remember the day you proposed to me?_

_It was about as mundane and unromantic as you could expect out of yourself, really. There you were just luxuriating naked in bed, and you said, "Marry me." That was all you said. Just, "Marry me."_

_I hadn't expected it. You, still half-asleep, looking at me the way you were._

_I would give anything now to have you look at me like that again._

_Love,_

_Draco_

* * *

...

Luna receives letters from Draco as well. He doesn't tell her anything about his whereabouts, either. He writes to her every few weeks to tell her he misses her and thinks of her, and how he is doing, asking after her. More than anything, his letters consist of detailed responses to whatever Luna writes to him, not much of himself. It's a careful and deliberate sort of avoidance. She shows Harry all his letters, and besides Narcissa, she is his only other connection to Draco now.

...

_Harry,_

_I think you'd be surprised to know we had a modest-sized house. Nothing too big, not too small. I never would have thought, in this life, that I could live in anything smaller than the Manor, but I think I hadn't cared so much about where we were so long as I got to be with you._

_I think you'd be surprised to know that I liked taking care of you. I reminded you to wear your coats and scarves and gloves in the winter, and gave you my coat when you were cold and you forgot, and I tied your tie for you and buttoned your overcoats when you did it all wrong in your hurry and organized your papers and things for you._

_I'd never have thought I could like taking care of another person._

_But I've never loved anyone as much as I have loved you either._

_Love,_

_Draco_

It's a strange thing to read — these vivid memories of a life he knew nothing of. That Draco had loved a boy forever somewhere in a place that was only real to him, and that boy was Harry.

And he can imagine him, sitting at the study desk in his dorm, writing all these letters he'll never send to somebody in a nonexistent world. To Harry. 

There were memories, scattered through their school years, easy moments by the Great Lake, snow fights in Hogsmeade, and a Yule Ball dream that rang like a familiar story — Harry tripping over his feet, the two of them dancing — and Harry remembered Draco telling him about it, only he didn't know then what he truly meant _._ There was a first kiss under the starry sky on a Quidditch pitch, and the two of them laid with their bodies sprawled opposite ways under a rain-grey sky, and the nights spent there alone, just as they had often done here. After, when they got a house, mundane little memories — Draco, sitting on the counter, Harry letting him taste a spoonful of something he made while they bickered over Draco's hard-to-please feedback. _Not terrible,_ he would say, and ridiculous notes and drawings and reminders left in random places, and wild dancing under Christmas lights.

In these letters, Draco is somebody painfully tender and sweet, and Harry has known him, in the way he looked at him, and bought him sweets, left him notes. In the way he took care of him in little ways. The way he held him close and kissed him so gently.

In these letters, Harry lives a whole life with Draco that he has no memory or knowledge of outside of these words, these disordered accounts of a life Harry can see himself wanting all of, here, in their imperfect reality, with his imperfect self. He wants a modest-sized house, and all his drawings and notes everywhere through their house. He wants to pull Draco onto their countertops, kiss him there every morning, every night, all the time. He wants to draw him into spontaneous dances whenever he felt like it, dance with him by Christmas trees and fairylights. He wants all of this. All of him. 

...

_Draco smiles, his face wrinkled and old, touching Harry's greyed hairline. By the Christmas trees, under fairylights, they went on dancing._

...

On another day, Narcissa tells him, "He's undergoing Permanent Partial Obliviation."

Harry frowns.

"It means he will erase everything to do with his dreams," is all she says, but Harry understands what she doesn't say with the way she's looking at him.

Harry goes home with his own voice distant in his ears, and he doesn't sleep well for weeks.

...

  
  


He stops looking for Draco.

He tries to move on, then, in earnest, but he doesn't know if it's truly moving on when he's doing it only in the current of his anger and hurt and grief, only in the utter despair that has overtaken him, that this is irrevocable, and no matter what now, he will never have Draco back, because Harry is nobody to him.

He still visits Narcissa, but now they do not speak about Draco. He just asks after her.

His friends worry about him. He knows he doesn't talk enough anymore, and he's always irritated when he's with them, and he doesn't care to clean much of his house or himself these days. He knows he's an utter mess.

"You can't just keep it all inside, Harry," Hermione says, one day in her and Ron's kitchen, finally having had enough of his brooding and sulking around, keeping everything in. "I don't know what happened that you can't even talk about him anymore, but-"

"I'm going home," Harry says. He stands up from his chair, grabs his coat from the hooks.

"No," Hermione says, and then she's beside him, grabbing his elbow. "No, today, you're going to _tell_ me what happened that has you so — "

"He fucking obliviated me out of his mind, Hermione!" Harry snaps, whirling on her so that her arm lets go of him instantly, and then it's all quiet, and it's just him breathing heavy and hard, Hermione staring at him with bald shock. The words are out there now, in the air, and it has never felt so real, every image he has ever had since of seeing Draco again one day, only for him to look at Harry like he's just a stranger he never met. A stranger he never kissed, wrote unsent letters to. A stranger he never loved.

"Oh, Harry," she whispers. Harry's eyes burn, jaw tight.

"He — he just fucking erased me out of his mind, and I—" His voice shakes. "I know I shouldn't be angry at him, I know he's just doing what's best for him, but I— what am I supposed to do now? He forgot me, just like that. What am I going to do when I can't..."

He lets Hermione hold him, quieting into her shoulder, blinking hard and fast.

...

So Harry tries to focus on other things in his life, tries his best to hold on to the understanding that Draco did what he needed to do to let go of something that was hurting him more than anything, and tries to let go himself, really, this time.

He gets accepted into St. Mungos' training institution in September. Hermione gets into the cursebreaking department not long after, Ron still working at the joke shop with George. He lives at Grimmauld Palace, spends months renovating and making Sirius' home into a home for himself with Luna and Neville's help. He goes for his training, comes home late in the evening, the rest of the day passing in further studies for tests. It's rigorous, as difficult as Draco always hounded on him for.

In all this, he tries his best not to think about Draco, and ends up thinking about him anyway. He's looking through furniture for Grimmauld Palace and thinking of what Draco would have said about the ugly ones. He's studying and beginning to slack off and he can hear Draco admonishing him. He's looking at a corner of his home, the countertop, the fireplace of his living room, and thinking about a part of Draco's letters, a part of his memories. He's wondering what their home looked like in Draco's dreams, sometimes wondered what it would have been like, remaking them all here, the two of them. Draco would leave him notes here, and here, and here, and he would kiss him every morning before he left for his training, and on Christmas every year, they would dance under fairylights by a tree, just like they did on the Quidditch pitch and the Astronomy Tower all those nights a long time ago.

On some bad nights, he still talks to him through the coin, foolishly imagining Draco is on the other side, listening to him, but he can't hear him breathing and it's hard to not remember he's only imagining it.

He still has his drawings and notes and letters, tucked away in a locked drawer, that he doesn't think he can ever open again, but the space weighs with it all whenever he looks at it. There's a part of him that thinks, _this isn't letting go_ , because letting go must mean he can imagine throwing them all away, but he can't. Not yet. Maybe one day, but the day is never today.

He goes with Hermione and Ron to a pub every weekend. They come in sometimes with a suggestion of somebody they know or the other, a co-worker, cousin of a friend, this one bloke they've heard a lot of good things about, trying to get him to move on without telling him that's what he has to do.

But he's trying, don't they know? What's the point of holding on to a boy that has long since forgotten he even exists. He's trying to forget him too. He really is.

Only, when he does try dating other people, it doesn't work no matter how smart and funny and attractive they are because none of them are the right kind of smart and funny and attractive and none of them have the right accent or the right voice or the right shade of silver eyes and white-blond hair and none of them — none of them are him.

Another year and a half later, Harry finishes his training at St. Mungos, gets his first ever job.

There comes a day that he thinks he's really beginning to move on. Harry still visits Narcissa every now and then, and Draco becomes a thought that passes through his mind several times a day, but it no longer hurts as much, except for some particular nights when he thinks about him a little too much, remembers their time together and aches for him to come back, except for certain moments where he wonders what Draco might think or say or do here. What is he doing right now? Is he happy?

"I miss you," Harry whispers into the coin, some nights. Only some nights.

  
  


…

It's another half a year later that Harry receives the letter.

_Harry,_

_You will always be the love of my life._

_But I do not need love to live._

_Thank you for a wonderful dream._

_Love,_

_Draco_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!!  
> We have two more chapters to go!!!
> 
> I wasn't able to reply back to most people in the last chapter - been a little up and down these weeks. So I'm saying a general thank you here to everybody who's reading, and who took the time to share their thoughts and leave their kind comments in the last chapter!! As always, I loved reading all your musings on this very odd and complicated little story  
> I hope you're all doing well, and you're safe!! 💙


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mentions of implied suicide attempt/ideation, depressive+dissociative responses, scarring, implications to past abuse, implied sexual content

Draco touches the hellebore leaves of his mother's garden, one hand inside his trouser pocket.

The last memory he has of this Manor is of flooing in to find his mother sat in the living room. He remembers her bemused sort of joy upon the sight of him, putting her wine glass away as she stood from the sofa. He remembers being tired in a way that seemed deeper than a need for sleep, crossing the weary steps towards her as he fell, more than anything, into her arms.

That night, he told her everything in a way he hadn't to anybody else outside of Aileen. Like the seven year old that used to tell her all his stories about the treehouse and the peacocks in their garden, the unkind things his father used to say in his cold anger.

But this time it was about vials of daydream potions. A beautiful green-eyed boy here and in another life, that he loved too much and not enough and not at all in the right ways. This time, it was of love at its worst, going nowhere, not quite going where it should, rotting to grief. 

_I wondered_ , his mother said, after the longest speechlessness. He hadn't seen her face, only heard the terrible tremor of her voice. _The way he had always seemed to be on your mind._

Strange, that he should come back again years later, and not feel so much the stench of the horrible things that happened here, the horrible people that lived here once. Strange that none of this weighs down on him so much anymore, because hardly anything is there of it in his mind, now, to hold that heaviness in him.

There, footsteps come nearer behind him, trudging in the dirt, rustling grass. He doesn't look behind him. He doesn't need to.

He knows him just by the sense of his feet falling to the ground.

He will know him just by the sound of his breathing.

"Draco."

Draco's throat convulses. He feels over the edge of a damp leaf scraping against his finger, grounding his senses into the planting of his shoes against the earth, the swell and sink of clean air moving through himself. It's a sweet and sickening pluck at the strings of his heart, hearing the sound of his own name in that lovely, quiet voice. 

He turns, a long moment after, only once he's fortified enough.

But he isn't at all ready for the violent and dizzying riot of his tender feelings, the cramp low in his gut that lingers its ache long after, at the simple sight of him. 

He is standing there with his hands in his pockets, shy as a schoolboy, head slightly low. But his face is something bare and strange, looking at him. His lips twitch, a helpless and breathy sort of flick, that stops before it can become anything like a smile.

Between them, in the winds of their silence, are all the years, time and history and the things said and unsaid. Done and undone.

"You're here," Draco says, when it goes on long enough. Just to say something to him, to hear his voice come back. "You came."

 _You came for me._ Another memory treads through his mind, one clarity amidst foggy faces and the white walls of a hospital, faded. Everything that happened around the memories he's had cut out of his mind—they've all gone faded.

"Yeah," he says, finally giving that breath of a small, hesitant smile. He brings with him, like summer breezes, the memories of coin calls and sneaking in and out of dorms and arms around him under the rectangle of a doorway, lying together on the floor of towers under galaxies, dancing under stars, huddled together in alcoves. Soft kisses and warm laughter and wild, spontaneous dancing. "Yeah, I did."

Harry.

His beautiful Harry.

…

Weeks after Draco leaves Hogwarts, he gets on another train that takes him to Cardiff, Wales, where Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini have made themselves a home in the muggle world. They wanted to escape the war and all its ruin, its ugly aftermath.

It is a strangely fortunate coincidence that they reach out to him, get in touch with him, not long after what has occurred. They tell him to come to Cardiff, and he goes, because they are another corner of familiarity in a world that's grown a stranger to him, and there is nowhere else he has anyway.

He goes through life there adrift and restless. Sick in his chest for a home that doesn't exist.

His home is not a tainted Manor where his entire childhood was spent. His home is not a dusty, ancient school he grew up in, brought ruin into. His home is not a beautiful green-eyed boy who once danced under the stars with him and laughed with him and brought him lunch, held him while he fell asleep. Who smiled at him soft and kissed him hard, told him he was in love with him. Who could not see enough in him to choose him.

His home is an intangible world away, and he can never go back.

There, he stays with Pansy and Blaise, with plans to get a job and save up money and build himself a life of his own. The distance and time was there between them at first, but eventually they bridge the gap. Eventually, the three of them come to be as they used to be, teasing him, a chaos of banter that they always pull him into, and maybe Draco does manage to act enough like the person they seem to be looking for, as if his body has its own practiced will. It helps him, just a bit, to not think about all that he left behind, to keep himself here and awake.

He writes letters to Luna and his mother. He tells Pansy and Blaise about learning wandless magic with Luna, and about Hogwarts, the new developments there. About sharing a room with Neville Longbottom and his many plants. He calls Pansy a bint and Blaise a tosser when they're acting like one, mocks the sexual tension between Pansy and their neighbour. He laughs when Pansy makes faces at him, smacks him with her magazines. 

But he isn't all there, and he isn't the same.

They notice that too. It's in their faces, the way they falter at times, seem confused, a wavering smile. He keeps going away, coming back, came back so strange all these years later. He doesn't like being touched where he always used to initiate it, moves away from Pansy's hands now. He doesn't eat enough. He doesn't sleep right, trembles in his dreams. He does not talk about Harry Potter when that is all he once seemed to do, whenever they bring him up, ask him questions about him. _Did he learn how to use a haircomb yet? Bet he's enjoying getting swamped by all his fans._

 _You're not still obsessed with him, are you, Draco darling?_ Pansy once says, smirking at him, her perfect eyebrow arched. It's been a joke with her, when they were fourteen and fifteen, sixteen, her trying to goad him and rile him into talking about Potter so he wouldn't be so quiet and withdrawn all the time. She looks at him now like she did then, with a sort of shadow of fear and worry in her eyes, silently examining him.

One day, Draco forgets to bring himself clothes into a shower at night, comes out to move quickly for his room—and runs right into Blaise.

His past is there on his body, all on full display, and though Blaise does not give away much of a reaction at first — that well-practiced cool and collected expression — the way his jaw goes tight and his breathing goes all wrong, gaze fixated on his torso, is enough of a reaction.

"What happened to you?" Blaise asks, as he's following after him into his room. He closes the door and moves towards Draco, where he's sitting himself down on the edge of the bed. Blaise has never been one to push for conversations like these, didn't in Sixth Year either. But he does now, kneeling at his feet with his hands hovering over him desperately, uncertainly, curling into fists because he knows he can't touch him.

"Salazar, please say something," Blaise is saying, his voice cracking. In his mind, Draco is going away somewhere else.

Blaise runs a hand down his face, resting at his mouth, wild-eyed and ablaze where they set lower on him again. "if I got my hands on whoever this was, I'd fucking kill them," he grits out, a low, trembling rage.

Draco gets a job at a shabby little coffee shop. He gets sacked after two weeks because he drifts away, doesn't get the orders right, forgets too much.

The night after, he finds himself standing with one leg out the parapet of the balcony. He went away thinking of grey and dim walls, a wand over him, a weight on him. He comes back, suddenly, horribly awake, the wind cold and raw in his lungs, on his face. He remembers a voice saying his name shakily, another calmer voice speaking to him, pleading with him to come down, _take my hand, come on, Draco_. He remembers a strong body against his cheek, arms around him. The sound of weeping against his shoulder.

He remembers not much after. The days that follow are a blur. He feels as if he's floating above his body, watching his life happen to someone else. His mind is full of a confusing, baffling meld of memories that he can't always pick apart where they came from. There are times when he can't remember his own name. He lays curled in bed, locked inside of himself.

Whenever he does come back, Pansy is often sat there beside him, though with a good amount of distance to give him space. There with her closeness, but not touching. Sometimes Blaise comes in, taps her shoulder, takes over.

Draco slips his hand into hers one day, and it startles her enough to spill her coffee all over her magazine. And when she looks at him, and sees his eyes fully focused on her, she presses her lips together, quivering, her eyes going red and teary.

"I'm sorry," Draco says, raspy from disuse. 

It takes her a while to get herself to speak, as if she's forcing her voice out. "Why did you try to do that?"

Draco stares at her. "I don't know," he croaks. "I don't know how to..." Even now, after having talked about it to Aileen, and Luna, and—he doesn't know how to speak of it to somebody new. Somebody so outside of it. There is a part of him that doesn't want to ruin this space of normalcy, that there is somebody who knows him and does not know that. But there is another part of him that is too tired of keeping it away.

"Try," Pansy says. "You have to try, darling."

But where does he start?

"I know somebody hurt you," Pansy says. "I know something terrible happened to you. Blaise—"

Draco's jaw tightens, looking away.

"He cares for you. We both do."

Draco doesn't say anything to that. Perhaps the worst thing is that he doesn't have enough in him to be angry all that much.

Pansy takes a deep breath. "Why can't you even _talk_ about Potter—"

"Don't say his name." It comes out abrupt, the breathless plea out of him before he can stop himself. His eyes burn, a horrible, nauseating lurch through him that leaves its pain long after. "Please just don't..."

Pansy stares at him, her neat brows pinched. "Okay," she says, after a while. "Okay, I won't. But I need to ask you if he had something to do with what happened—"

"No," Draco snaps, loud, a rush of fierce, protective anger like he hadn't felt in a while now, leaving him nearly breathless. "Merlin, no, Pans, what the fuck are you even—he wouldn't ever—"

"He already did," she says, coldly, and Draco goes silent, thinking of his thinnest, oldest scars beneath the others. There's something else there, the way she's eying him.

"He was the one that saved me."

"From what?"

"Death-Eaters. You Know Who— they took me, and they—for months—" He's shaking, and cold. But that is about all he can get out of himself. Pansy is frozen, and then she's trembling, blinking hard.

"I thought... Blaise and I thought you were..." She's pressing the back of her wrist to her mouth, as if she's going to be sick. "Oh God—"

Her eyes are distant, and it's a long time when they fill again with herself. When she manages to compose herself, pull her hand away. She closes her eyes, her chest heaving, as if to put away the last of what she felt. She does not leave, even when she seems like she could use some air away from a room suffocated by the weight of what he's told her.

"He..." Her throat convulses, once, twice, pushing something back. "He got you out?"

"He got me out," Draco says, "and he—"

_He kept me sane._

_He made me happy._

But he doesn't finish that..

"Okay," Pansy says, nodding, still shaky. "Okay." Her hand stays around his. 

It's a while after that she speaks again.

"You're still mad over him."

Draco's head snaps up.

Pansy snorts at whatever he must look like, pressing her fingers at the corner of her mascara-smudged eyes, blinking. She moves it away, looking at them, when she says with a wry sort of smirk, "Second to Fourth Year. I had the worst crush on you."

Draco knew about it, noticed it. He never knew how to tell her he didn't feel the same.

"And then I heard the way you talked about him, saw the way you looked at him. I mean, _really_ looked at him." She scoffs, shaking her head, leaning back against the headboard. "I tried to ignore it for the longest time, but — eventually I did realise there was no chance, because you weren't even into girls."

"You never said anything," Draco says, unnerved that she would know that about him for years. Touched that she protected his secret, all without a word to him. "That you knew about me being—"

Pansy snorts. "It's not as if you'd have taken it well, if I _had_ pointed it out. I'm not even sure you _knew_."

Draco thinks he must have, just could never let himself put it into words, admit it so clearly. Not when he had a bigoted father he was desperate to please. Not when hating him was easier than letting himself be in love with him.

"He loved me too."

Pansy looks down at him, bewildement at first, and then sadness, and Draco doesn't know what he looks like, just that he sounded awful. He knows her, and he knows she wants to ask him a million things about that, but he loves her for not asking anything at all. She squeezes his hand, the one still holding hers, whispering, "Oh, darling."

All can do is stare up at the ceiling, blurry-eyed. Talking about him, even if they don't say his name, stings all his sensitive, chaffed nerves, grief sinking heavy as a boulder on his sternum.

Thankfully, they speak no more of it. Pansy sniffs, hard, wiping at her face. "Listen to me," she says. "You're going to get help, okay?" Draco looks at her, and is already, hopelessly thinking of all the reasons he won't be able to— "I've come into my maternal grandmother's inheritance."

Shame and pride, that he thought he left behind in a hospital bed and a dream and a cellar, flares in him. "Pansy..." 

"Whatever you need," Pansy cuts him off. "Pay me back some day, but for fuck's sake, just — just get better. You _have_ to get better."

* * *

Near the end of November, Harry receives another letter, this time from Narcissa.

_He's coming home._

Draco. He's coming home, back to Wiltshire, tomorrow. He's coming to stay here with his mother through the winter holidays. _God,_ Harry thinks, the letter between his hands.

"God," he says, out loud this time, breathing a laugh, uncertain if what he's feeling is him about to cry as well.

How funny, he thinks, that he's spent months half-convinced he's moving on, only to run after Draco the first chance he gets. 

But then there were days he turned Draco's last letter over and over, reading it, trying to derive more hope than hopelessness from it. _You are, and always will be, the love of my life_ , it said.

That Draco had called him _the love of his life_. That he had, in fact, not chosen to erase Harry wholly from his mind, the way it seemed he would.

That Draco didn't forget _him._

Draco _didn't forget him._

 _But I do not need love to live,_ it also said, and he still doesn't know what to make of it.

Narcissa meets him at the fireplace the morning after. Harry hugs her, and when she lets him go, he's hardly missing a heartbeat as he asks, "Where is he?"

"In the gardens," Narcissa says. She smiles at him, sincere, touching his arm delicately. "I'm glad you're getting to see him again, Harry."

There, Harry follows the cobblestone path until he's led to the back of a beige overcoat, dark trousers, the collar of a black rollneck. His white-blond hair at the nape of his neck. He is stood by some bushes, was examining them with a hand in his pocket. But his fingers have stilled at the sound of Harry's footsteps.

"Draco."

He doesn't know what he's expecting Draco to say. He's expecting anger, perhaps, some sort of unhappiness on seeing him again. The way his last letter had gone, it seemed like it could be.

It's not the way he turns, with a face so lovely and hesitant, a hint of a smile mellow at the corner of his mouth. Harry nearly smiles back at him, pushed out of him like the breath stuck heavy and painful in his throat, stops himself. They tumble in his chest, slow and unsteady — love and longing, all the years of them long and old, burning afresh up to the base of his throat.

"You're here," is what Draco says first, into the long silence, like he has perhaps wondered if Harry would be. "You came."

"Yeah," Harry says, finally giving him that small smile stopped before. "Yeah, I did."

 _I'll always come for you_.

They sit on chairs by the bushes, a line of hydrangeas. And it's hard to know what to say. There were all these things Harry wanted to say, for ages. But now it's like he's forgotten words, lost all thought, finally seeing him in front of him, drinking in his fill of him when he isn't looking back.

When they do speak, it's at the same time, "I thought—" "You look—" And then they're both caught in a, "you go first," "what were you saying—"

They both stop. There's a tug at Harry's mouth, but he rolls it back, trying to duck his head to hide it until he catches the corner of Draco's lips twitching as well. They're looking at each other, and then there's a laugh breaking out of them at the same time, Harry still so desperately, horribly in love with the cresent moons of his cheeks and the light of his grey eyes, and they are almost, _almost_ like they were when they were a few years younger. And yet, nothing like it. They never will be.

"I was just going to say that… you look good," Harry says, still smiling from their prior moment. Draco looks healthier, and happier. He looks lighter somehow in the way he held himself, like he's been taking good care.

 _You look so beautiful_ , Harry can't say, because it's been years and things are different and Harry doesn't really know how Draco feels about him today, even though he has his hopes.

Draco flicks a slight smile at him, glancing away. It's a bit comforting to know that maybe Harry isn't the only one feeling a bit out of sorts here.

"You were, um… " Harry gestures vaguely, at a loss yet again. He swallows around the throb of his own erratic heart, the turmoil of his feelings that made him feel tender under his skin all over. "You were going to say something."

"Just that I thought of coming to see you. But I wasn't sure what you'd think of that."

"I didn't know either if you'd… I mean, after your letter… you sounded like you might not want to."

Draco's head lifts at that, looking at him. His throat bobs. "That was to symbolise to myself that I was moving on. That I could."

Harry's heart dips heavy in his chest. "Oh."

They lapse into silence then, as Harry's mind whirls on the words, all the little hope he derived from the letter before now in ruins at his feet. It's like being left behind, being the only one that didn't move on. It's like watching a train take the boy he loves away, all over again.

Still, the question remains as to why Draco chose not to forget him.

"You didn't… forget me," Harry says, looking down at his hands.

"You know about that," Draco says, sounding a little bewildered.

"Yeah. Your mum… she told me."

Draco hums. In Harry's peripheral vision, he can see him turn to face ahead. "You were the last piece, since you were the clearest root of those memories. Forgetting you would have made my obliviation permanent."

"But you didn't do it. Why?"

"I tried to," Draco says. He smiles at Harry a wry sort of way. "I couldn't do it."

And there is something in the way that he's looking at him, then, that has Harry hoping that maybe he isn't left behind at all. That maybe they are both still here, still wanting and waiting and desperately, horribly in love. Harry swallows, and his heart lifts as much as it breaks in an entirely different way. He smiles at Draco, a little wavering, and one corner of Draco's lips turn up too, tentatively shared.

  
  


...

  
  
  


And so it goes, the two of them like strangers with histories, relearning the new people they were shaped into by the years.

They go out for lunch, and it is all simple and easy at first, mostly small talk and little jokes, trying to find their footing and old comfort again. Harry asks Draco where he's been, and the story is that he's been staying with Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini in Wales, had grown close over the years with them again. He worked for a bit while he lived with them, but it didn't work out. Pansy got a large inheritance from his maternal grandmother, and she used this to aid Draco financially with his Mind-Healing and then partial Obliviation procedure, and he plans to pay her back. There's a lot more to it, Harry is sure, but he lets that be enough for now.

After, the silence comes over them, sitting across each other on booths. The large panelled window of the coffee shop brings daylight in on them. The server comes with their orders and leaves.

"I'm sorry for the way I had left," Draco says, after a while, his voice low. "Without a word to you."

Harry thought it would be a while before they get to this. But it's almost a relief, the prospect of getting it all out of the way, to make sense of their story together.

"No," Harry says. "No, I get it now. Why you did." He pauses, fingers tapping at his knee. "I was angry at first, yeah. But then I… I got it. I mean, I don't think I can even imagine — maybe the closest I can ever get is, you know..." Harry looks up at him, swallowing, "The letters. But even then, I'll never live through them, will I—"

But Draco's face is changing, from merely listening to something else. His brows are furrowed, his mouth parted, hovering over his next words. "Sorry. What—what letters are you talking about?"

"The ones you, um… left behind for me?"

Draco stares at him, wide-eyed. He blinks, breaking away when he must have seen Harry's nervousness. "You weren't supposed to read those," he mumbles. There is a faint flush on Draco's cheeks. He leans forward, his elbow on the table, rubbing at his brows in some self-soothing way. "They should have been incinerated the moment anybody else tried to touch them."

"Shit, I… I swear I didn't know that. I'm sorry. I really thought you meant for me to—"

"No. It's alright." Draco clears his throat, but is still unable to look at him.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine. Just— " He huffs, quavering a bit, going quiet for half a moment. "They were all mad. And personal. And incredibly pathetic."

Harry's brows twitch, a doleful frown. He wants to reach over and take his hand, seeing him like this, remembering those letters. But he keeps himself where he is. "No they weren't. They were…" He loses his voice, his throat burning. He leans forward, as if to bring himself within Draco's vision, wishing he would look at him. "They made me understand you better. How you felt."

They drink their coffee in silence after. Harry lets it go on, so Draco can settle down some, and thinks back through these past years. He thinks, again, of all the things he has been wanting to say, that he used to say into a coin that had nobody on the other end. There were so many things, and yet now, finally sitting here in front of Draco, in the surreal wonder of a moment he once waited and hoped for desperately, they've all seemed to become vapour in his mind. He wants to ask him so many things — _are you happy now_ , and _do you know how much I've missed you,_ and _have you moved on,_ _did you find somebody else_ , _do you still feel that way for me_ , but it would be too much, too fast, when Draco's only just come back. 

He thinks vaguely of the way he's tried so hard to move on, all of his lost relationships. Daniel, fun and casual, and his first time with a man. Gretchen, who lasted with him a month before they realised it wouldn't work out, that something was lacking between them. Fin, who got drunk with him and heard him talk about Draco once, just once, and told him the next day that he can't be with him when he's still in love with somebody else, because Harry will never be able to give him the time and effort he deserves until Harry moves on from his old love.

He thinks of him and Draco, that day on the Astronomy Tower. The last time they spoke to each other, and how it was a fight, and how scared and broken Harry had been that that would be the last thing he would have ever said to him, _is it me you're in love with, or is it just some dream of me,_ because Draco may have forgotten it all, but Harry will always remember that that was the way he hurt him, and that is the way Draco got to the point where he found it better to carve holes into his memory than to remember him, and that Harry would never have him back again after the way they ended. Would never get to tell him that he still loved him, wanted him back.

"I'm sorry too," Harry says quietly, nearly breathless with the weight of his emotions. Draco looks up at him across the table, his face smoother than it was minutes ago. "I was selfish, wasn't I? You going through all that, and all I could…"

"Well. I think you were alright where you were." Draco leans back on the booth, resting a wrist on the tabletop. "Nobody wants to be second to some nonexistent version of themselves. I know I wouldn't. And... " Quieter, "And I wasn't in a place to be good for you back then either."

"Neither was I," Harry says, lips squinching sadly. "For you."

 _Can we be now?_ A good part of him wants to ask. His heart beats loud throughout his body. _Can we try again?_

But Harry loses all his nerve, and ends up asking instead, "So, the obliviation procedure, um — what happened?"

Draco intakes a small breath. "Well. They are as good as removed, in that I don't _remember_ them. I know them only as facts, and they no longer feel any more real than mere dreams. So they have no hold over me."

"That's… that's good. Right?"

"As good as it can be. Though I'll have to have it done again every couple of years, if they ever start coming back."

It feels too great of a price, for having loved Harry once.

…

  
  


"I heard Draco's returned to England," Hermione says. They've all taken to calling Draco by his name over time, having picked it up from Harry.

"Wait, he's back?" Ron asks, brows up to his hairline. He looks at Harry. "Really?"

"He did," Harry says, has to repress a ridiculous smile, looking down at his hands. "He came back."

Ron's gaping a little, and then breaks into a huff of a grin, deflating back against the booth. That's Ron, the kind of friend who gets happy purely for him. "Harry, that's — "

"Yeah," Harry says, grinning back at him. "Yeah, it is." And then tells them about their lunch together.

"So _—_ so what now?"

"So what now?"

"I mean," Ron gestures vaguely at him. "I mean. Are you both going to, you know- I guess, pick up where you left off? You have feelings for him, and... and you said he didn't do that obliviation thing, right? So that has to mean…"

"I don't know," Harry says, rubbing the back of his neck. "He's only been here for a day. I don't know if he still feels anything like that for me."

"Oh."

"Yeah, so then… then just friends. I suppose. Unless _he_ wants anything like that."

Hermione looks at him ruefully, taking his hand and squeezing. "I'm sorry, Harry."

"No. It's okay," Harry says, exhales a breath through his nose. "I think… I think I've maybe caused him more hurt than it's worth. And it can be enough. Just to have him here, with me."

  
  


...

The day after, Harry tags along with Draco when he goes to see Luna at her place.

Luna's face lights up on seeing Draco. She stands from her deeply, unsightly couch, and she runs across the distance, flinging herself right into his arms as he catches her. Draco is laughing as he stumbles back, holding her tight. Harry thinks of the way he used to move away from everybody's hands, and how he's told Luna in his letters of forgetting those memories of what had happened to him too.

Luna hugs him too, after, and Harry sits there at breakfast with them, answers all of their questions. But mostly he finds himself quietly watching him, and the two of them, all throughout. Mostly, he finds himself noting all the little, lovely changes in him. How much more settled he's become within himself, grounded and bright and easy.

Mostly, he finds himself falling in love with him anew.

Harry listens to them discuss their lives with each other, watches Draco perform his wandless magic to show Luna his progress, all that he's learned because of her. It's effortless now, nearly without thought, the things he does. Levitating the dishes into the sink with his hands, transfiguring a spoon into a cup. But now, under his sleeve, he keeps a wand as well. His hand is steady when he holds it now, listing its properties. Blackthorn wood. Thestral hair. Sturdy. He shows Luna a tattoo on his right forearm. A half-moon, surrounded by swirls of intricate patterns. They seem to blend into many more under, peeking out at the fold of his sleeve.

"Oh, Draco! It's so pretty," Luna says, her delighted smile beaming up at Draco.

"After you," Draco tells her.

Luna's smile turns softer, glancing back down as she puts her fingers to it.

…

Before they had a love, they had a friendship, and in their friendship, it is strangely natural to pick up where they left off, fall back together again like that. All their easy laughter and bantering, coming back, almost as if there had been no years between them at all.

And they're walking down the streets of London after a night at the pub, Harry's tongue running away from him, telling him this and this and this. Telling him everything, namely of these past few years, except he's leaving out all the ways he's been craving after him.

He tells him about his journey to Healing, his examinations and training at St. Mungos. He tells him about his visits to Narcissa, about Ron and Hermione and everybody, his renovations of Grimmauld Palace. In return, Draco tells him little stories about his time in Wales, about Pansy and Blaise, all the things they did and the places they went. 

The conversation dwindles into silence, eventually, but still there's a loose and free feeling to the joints of his body, the flow of his thoughts, like there are still a hundred other things he wants to be saying to him. Like he can walk down these streets and talk to him and be with him forever. Harry doesn't realise he's staring at him, taking him in, until Draco meets his eyes, tossing him a raised eyebrow, a hint of something that is as exasperated as much as amused.

"What?"

"What?"

"You're staring at me," Draco says, with an edge of a huff to his voice.

Harry smiles, shaking his head. "Sorry. I just… I guess I just can't believe it. That you're really here." _And I just can't stop looking at you._

Draco's lips turn up a little, looking down at the slow, swaying steps of their walking.

"This is me," Harry says, at the point of Apparition closest to Grimmauld Palace. Standing by a streetlight, he turns around to face him, nervously pushing his hands into a pocket a little deeper. There's silence. And then, "Do you… would you want to come along? Just to, um... see the place? You know, technically, it could sort of be yours too. Since you're a Black and all, but it's still mine, of course, since, um—" He laughs, rubbing at the back of his hair. "Since it was left to me. I mean, I thought maybe you would want to take a look around, see what I've done with it and—" Harry stops, realising he's rambling. Draco's smirking at him, seeming mostly amused by him now, and something else perhaps mellower. Perhaps familiar.

"I'd like to see it," Draco says.

Harry grins at that, slow and small. "Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So… so come on with me." He jostles his hand out of his coat pocket, reaches down between them and takes a hold of Draco's wrist. Draco glances down at it, Harry's hand loosening, hesitating. "I—it's under a Fidelius charm. I'd have to—"

"It's alright," Draco says, raising his gaze to his. He looks back down again, when he takes Harry's hand instead. Harry's throat bobs, stuck onto his face, and _God_ , he thinks to him inside his head, _God, I'm still so in love with you._

Harry entwines their fingers together, and takes Draco to his home.

  
  


…

  
  


Somehow Draco ends up staying there until midnight, the two of them lying together comfortably on the rug of the living room. Every now and then, Harry's socked feet bumps against his, the back of his hand pressing featherlight to Draco's own.

He's smiling a lot, gesturing with his hands as he tells him, rapt, about the most peculiar cases he's had through his work. Every now and then, he glances over to find Draco's eyes, as if searching for his reactions. Their faces are close, but not too much so, and Draco keeps having his attention stray to the movement of his mouth. His smile. A small laugh to himself at a certain part of his story.

Draco only then becomes aware of the tug at his own cheek, there of its own accord, unbeknownst to himself. 

"Did you ever, um… find somebody else?" Harry asks him, after a while.

Draco looks at him. "No, I didn't." A beat. "Did you?"

"Not really," Harry says. He's not looking back at him. "I tried. Didn't really work out."

"What happened?"

Harry doesn't say anything for a few seconds. Then, "I don't know." 

He shifts the topic, asks him about his potions mastery. Draco took his NEWTs privately a year back, got into an average institution for his good grades, exceedingly so for their criteria, but the more high-tier ones weren't open to taking him, since his history was no secret. 

"They won't ever know what they…" Draco's voice trails off, in a low voice. He huffs, derisive. "The way I can't even stand the thought of... I don't remember any of it, but I _saw_ it on my—"

He saw it on his body, the day after his obliviation. All the scars of what they did. He didn't remember how they got there, beyond an intellectual knowing of what had happened — but they were all over him, and the reality of it still lived within them, and even if it had less of a hold on him without his memories, it did not stop hurting.

There, Harry's hand takes his. He breathes, not looking at him. They stay like that for a long minute, until the turmoil in his chest settles somewhat. There's a shift of Harry's hand down his wrist, fingers on his arm, trailing at the hem of his folded sleeve.

"What's this one?" Harry asks. He's trying to distract him.

"Narcissus flowers."

"After your mother."

"Yes. I have a lot of them," Draco says. Harry's tracing a line of the Narcissus flowers covering over his Dark Mark.

"Where else?"

Draco tilts a small smile at him. "A lot of places."

Harry raises an eyebrow, amused. "A _lot_ of places?"

Draco rolls his eyes, kicks at his socked ankle. "Not the ones you're thinking of, pervert."

Harry laughs, kicks back at him. "Who says I'm thinking of anything?"

"You _would_ lack the capacity for that."

"Tosser."

"Wanker."

"Can I see them?"

Draco tosses him a glance, pausing. Then, a hum, affirmative and soft. He sits up, takes his shirt off. 

They're all over him. He covered himself, and all of a terrible past he no longer remembered, with everything good, everything that meant something to him: the people he loved, anything he liked. There were the flowers that reminded him of his mother's name around his Dark Mark. The half-moon, after Luna, on his other arm. A snake for Blaise. Intricate patterns and designs chosen by Pansy. The constellation of Draco. _Ostendam Astronomia_ above that _,_ by his collarbone, to remind himself that magic was still beautiful. That he can feel it now, again. 

Harry touches his fingers to his skin, runs them over a rib. They falter, unexpected, at the raise of smooth tissue, tremble there. He's looking closer now, and maybe he's seeing them, the hints of them everywhere. Everywhere under ink, a scar. A reminder of that reality, and that past. He looks wrecked, eyes going red-rimmed and pinched, jaw clenching. He shakes his head.

"I can't even imagine what those fucking bastards did to…" he says, shaky, still with his fingers on his skin. 

"I don't remember it," Draco tells him. A corner of his mouth turns up, though it quivers. "I don't even remember what they look like. Or their names. Anything about it. They're gone forever."

"Good," Harry says, nodding, throat convulsing. He presses the back of his sleeve to his eyes. "I'm glad that you don't ever have to...sorry. I'm not the one who should..."

Draco watches him, gathering himself up, moving his hand away from his face. He's watched him all his life from the sidelines, all his unbelievable goodness, how much he felt for those he cared about.

_I came back for you, too._

_I came back hoping that you still_

There is a way that he's looking back at Draco now, fixated and soft, held there the way they were in firelight. His eyes, brilliant and evergreen, and in them the thinnest sheen of the tears that had once saved his life.

He had been on the edge of erasing him from his mind, wholly and irrevocably, that day. He would have. Pansy says that he should have. That surely nobody could be worth remembering, holding on to, after such terrible grief. That, he did remember, though hazily when it was so closely associated to his lost memories, but he remembered the way it had felt, with not much exaggeration, like he may just be dying without him. Love at its worst. Too much of it, and too much of anything was never a good thing.

Draco couldn't bring himself to go through with it, in the end. Not even in his hopelessness. Not even in that overwhelming, exhausting love and grief that he had felt then. At the core of himself, it wasn't this, him, that he wanted to forget. It was how it hurt the way it did to remember him, and everything else that came with him. It was his dreams, and the way they made everything in his life lose colour in comparison, made Draco need him sickeningly. But that was not the fault of what they were born from in the first place.

His mind is clear, when he looks at him now. He is awake, and they are real. Draco lifts himself up on an elbow, over Harry's face, shifting closer as he pushes back his hair behind an ear. Harry blinks, lips parting, eyes falling down to his mouth. They stay there, full with a quiver of a desperate emotion, and there's no question of the way he still feels. The way he looks at him. The soft way he touches him.

Draco leans down and kisses him, the sound of a sharp inhale from Harry, like he's been holding his breath in anticipation. By the next second he's dragging a hand up Draco's hair, pulling him deeper into the kiss. 

When they break away, Harry's rolling his lips back, a nearly helpless sort of a smile blooming, slow, into a grin anyway. His nose presses featherlight against his, so close they were.

"I'm still," Harry whispers. "so terribly mad over you."

Draco's cheeks tighten into a smile, just as terribly mad himself, over him. He kisses him again, kisses him long and deep and slow like he's making up for all the years worth of losses, skin heated, tender all over from his spine to his scalp.

He breaks it, a moment after, strokes Harry's curls back from his temple and whispers, "Take me to bed."

Harry does so, pulling him by the hand, leading him to his room. In the doorway, they start kissing again, dizzy with euphoria and helplessly laughing and kissing their way to the bed, land together on it like an afterthought. Draco presses him down into the mattress, with his hands in his hair, on his face, Harry's arm around his waist wrapping him close, then even closer with the other. They roll over into the sheets, still kissing, Harry breaking away to press heavy kisses down his jaw, his neck, a scar on his shoulder, presses his apologies to the ones he gave him. Then lingering, almost reverently, to the centre of his chest. 

  
  


…

  
  


"Can I ask you something?"

They're lying together, faces close on the pillow, blankets up to their underarms.

Draco narrows his eyes, feigning bemusement behind a repressed smirk. "You just did."

Harry rolls his eyes, pressing the hint of his own smile back. "Can I ask you _two_ questions then?"

Draco huffs a laugh. "Ask away."

But it takes Harry a while to ask what he wants, thoughts seeming to hover around his question.

"Why didn't you come back after the obliviation, if you still felt... I mean, you didn't send any letters after... I spent months believing you erased me entirely, and I..." His voice goes a little strained, trailing off for a bit. "I think I felt like I was going mad for a while."

"I thought that... I was sure you must have moved on, after all this time."

"I tried to," Harry says, repeating his own words back from before. "I couldn't do it." 

Draco's lips tighten, a doleful little thing. His grip tightens around his, for a second. "More than anything," he continues. "I was scared of the way I had once felt for you. I was scared to find out you've moved on, and I was scared that I'd come running back to you if you didn't. That I could ever feel that way again. And so, I needed to prove to myself that I could do it without you. And I... could. I did." His jaw shifts, eyes drifting. Softly, "It's just that I didn't want to anymore."

He comes back to Harry's face, finds him gentle and understanding. His love for him is a calmer thing now, no longer an entire ocean gone to storm—but he is impossibly, overwhelmingly precious, and for a moment, it drowns him under.

"I've missed you so much," Harry murmurs. He runs a thumb over Draco's cheekbone. "I wish I'd... I wish I never made you leave."

"Wasn't your fault," Draco says. "I left because I was not alright."

"But there are still things that I did, that I think about now, and I realise how much they must have hurt you. And I didn't do right by you at all. Not telling Ginny and everybody. Not choosing us, you."

Draco keeps his face careful. "I know they felt like all you had. And you weren't wrong, when you said that I was more in love with a dream than you."

Harry closes his eyes. "That was... such an arsehole thing to say. That I threw back into your face everything that helped you survive. I didn't think of it like that. I didn't think much at all. But that's what I did, and Draco I am _sorry—_ "

Draco traces his eyebrow, the space under his eye that has gone tight with his breathlessly desperate shame and distress. It is a silent forgiveness. It seems to soothe Harry, the furrow at his brows relaxing minutely.

"If..." Draco says, after a while. "If we are doing this again, then..." Harry's waiting, his face open. His thumb is rubbing over the side of Draco's hand. Draco tries to keep it off his voice, but that old, heavy hurt is making its way through him anyway. "Don't...be embarrassed of me." It's slow, enunciated, quiet. "Don't put me at the last of your list again, because I can't..."

"I'm not. I won't," Harry says, quickly, sincerely. "Never again. Draco, I... I told them all, after you left. I told them about how I felt for you." He pauses, hesitating, looking down at their hands. He breathes. "I did something stupid before that. Got together with Gin, trying to move on from you. But I quickly realised how shitty it was, and she was obviously upset, and _—_ " His mouth works, shaking his head.

"It's alright. It's in the past now," Draco says, reading his remorse. "I left, didn't I. It's her you ought to _—_ did you make up with her then? How did they take it?"

"I did. They took it much better than I thought, really," Harry says, and tells him the entire story of it. 

"Do you know," Draco says, a while later. "That day I was going in for the obliviation, and I couldn't go through with forgetting you," Harry nods at it. "it wasn't you there that I thought of the most. I thought of you here."

It was him he thought of. Just him. Lying on that hospital bed, Draco's head was so full of him _—_ their coin calls, and their nights on the Quidditch pitch and the Astronomy Tower, and the way he smiled at him, kissed him. The way they used to laugh together, and dance together. His dreams were brighter than that, but now that they're gone, he can see that they were not at all worth the grief they gave him, and they were not worth more than this. They were not worth more than Harry as he truly is. 

Draco shifts his head closer to him on the pillow. Harry smiles, murmurs, _hello,_ brushes Draco's hair from his temple.

"Harry," Draco whispers to him, smiling back. "My Harry."

Harry stills at that, staring up at him. His lips are half-formed around his surprise, eyes wide.

Then, something breaks into his face, a ripple of emotion, and then a wave through him. He laughs, nearly a silent breath, tremulous. He crosses the inch between them quick, kisses him hard, and Draco loves him better like this: real, and true, honestly wanting him back. Not the snatched love of a falsified dream, nobody truly there behind that perfect, empty deity.

 _I love you now and here,_ he thinks to him, when he draws back, Harry smiling back at him with a face so sweet, and his eyes full with tenderness, with himself. _Everything that you are._

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh so close to the end, we are!!! One more chapter (and it's all good stuff from here on 🙌)  
> I'm sorry for stringing you all along with this fic so much 🙈 but in my defense, this is all extremely complicated 
> 
> In other news, Iwrteficsnottragedies made a GORGEOUS playlist for this fic, so if you're interested, please take a look at it [here](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLljb4xyHv0LXX6gNxHgk2XK1yQt4f8Pbw)
> 
> And as always, thank you so much for all the kind feedback and for sharing all your thoughts on the last chapter!! 💙


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